Cruise To Halve Its Road-Going AV Fleet, California DMV Asked It To Trim SF Operations

Training a combination of hardware and software to behave better than humans while controlling a motor vehicle is no easy feat. Tesla's Elon Musk promised shareholders robotaxis running on Full Self-Driving Beta four years ago, and they're still nowhere to be seen.

Fortunately, startups like Cruise and Waymo have taken the bull by the horns and ventured into making this concept of eliminating the need for a human driver a reality almost anyone can experience.

Cruise even announced its expansion to three new cities, saying it's confident in applying what its systems learned in San Francisco in other parts of the country. Even controversial ads were published on some platforms saying that a computer can drive much safer than a human.

But making the human driver irrelevant is a tough challenge. Not because creating the right autonomous driving system is complicated, but due to the fact that public trust is hard-earned and easily lost.

Growing pains

Two Cruise AVs were involved in separate collisions on the same night. The first was with a San Francisco fire truck, and the second was with a privately-owned vehicle. The former prompted the GM-owned robotaxi company to investigate what happened in-depth, while the latter put the human driver in the guilty booth.

The company communicated immediately about these incidents via social media channels and released a detailed statement hours later, sharing its findings and point of view.

Concerning the crash with a gray sedan, Cruise said its AV had the green light and moved forward as expected. The human driver was the one allegedly speeding and running a red light. However, the video below shows the AV freezing in the intersection before the crash. It would have avoided that collision if it had accelerated slightly and moved forward.

That is a known issue with Cruise AVs. The company promised to fix it after a similar accident in San Francisco last year. But keep in mind that driving is a complex venture, and what may have seemed fixed at one point could prove to need more fine-tuning on another occasion.

However, the collision with the fire truck is more complicated because an occupant was hurt. The person had to be taken to a nearby hospital.

Just the facts

Cruise said the AV wasn't able to correctly identify the emergency vehicle because it was traveling in the oncoming lane of traffic. That's something fire trucks, police vehicles, and ambulances will do when there's an emergency they must reach. The company should have trained its vehicles for such scenarios.

But in Cruise's defense, we found a video that shows the robotaxi can yield when recognizing an emergency vehicle at an intersection. Specific scenarios like the abovementioned one may have not yet been fed into to system or are still in beta stages of development.

It's essential, however, to mention that, when writing, there is no conclusion regarding who is legally liable for what happened. Also, we weren't informed regarding the relationship between the hurt passenger and Cruise.

The company's Terms and Conditions specify that passengers won't be required to "indemnify the Cruise Parties for any bodily injury or property damage to the extent caused by our negligence, recklessness, or willful misconduct in providing our Services."

The said document was recently updated and also stipulates that Cruise is ready to stand behind its products and underlines explicitly that it won't limit its liability to its customers "for bodily injury to the extent that our negligence, fraud, reckless or intentional misconduct, or a defect in our Services caused the bodily injury, or for any matters in which liability cannot be excluded under applicable law." But this might only come in handy if the AV is found to be at fault and not the fire truck.

But the pain doesn't end here for Cruise. An AV was recently noticed being confused in an intersection where construction workers were fixing a road. The robotaxi couldn't figure out what to do and sprinted onto the oncoming lane instead of making a safe maneuver in a predictable manner.

Over 10 units stalled a couple of days ago in San Francisco's North Beach area, prompting Cruise to announce that it wants its own. The company blamed wireless connectivity issues for that mayhem.

Another Chevy Bolt made netizens laugh and question its capabilities after it drove into wet concrete.

The DMV had enough

After this string of incidents, California's DMV asked Cruise to halve its fleet of road-active autonomous vehicles. The agency requested that no more than 50 driverless vehicles roam the San Francisco streets by day and 150 at night. The DMV didn't force Cruise to add human operators to the cars. The AVs will remain driverless and remotely supervised.

Cruise did not hesitate or push back. It has confirmed to TechCrunch that it is complying.

Although an apparent setback, this is a healthy development for the AV space. Companies need not be arrogant or smug. After so many incidents, Cruise should thoroughly check its system and ensure that the self-driving Chevy Bolts can safely roam the streets of San Francisco.

The company should also take advantage of this forced pause and reevaluate the expansion. It should approach launching in other cities with great care now. People are already protesting the presence of AVs on public roads. From "coning" to actively pushing against them through official channels and public campaigns, few steps remain.

Finally, Cruise and Waymo received regulatory approval around 10 days ago to expand their operations throughout San Francisco and charge around $3 per mile for zero-tailpipe emission rides. One of these companies did not have to deal with so many challenges.

surveillance cam footage of last night’s crash. driver of the gray car coming down mission st. toward the autonomous car, which appears to have started driving through a green light.

the empty cruise vehicle detects the oncoming car — and stops dead in the intersection. https://t.co/idznWH3DfH pic.twitter.com/OdpwNzm5s5

— Eleni Balakrishnan (@miss_elenius) August 19, 2023