Protesters stop Waymo and Cruise self-driving cars with only a traffic cone : NPR

Table Of Content

• Self-driving Waymo cars gather in a San Francisco neighborhood, confusing residents
• News 4/9
• Self Driving Car
• In A Divided San Francisco, Private Tech Buses Drive Tension
• The invisible seafaring industry that keeps the internet afloat
• Teen suspected of torching Waymo car in SF's Chinatown: police
• GM’s Cruise Loses Its Self-Driving License in San Francisco After a Robotaxi Dragged a Person

The group's goal is to incapacitate the driverless cars roaming San Francisco's streets as a protest against the city being used as a testing ground for this emerging technology. Forghani said Cruise provided regulators a video of the incident and is complying with the DMV's order and "pausing operations." Those cars that have a human safety driver will be allowed to continue operating in the state. As we continue working to rebuild trust and determine the city where we will scale driverless, we also remain focused on continuing to improve our performance and overall safety approach. To that end, Cruise is resuming manual driving to create maps and gather road information in select cities, starting in Phoenix. This work is done using human-driven vehicles without autonomous systems engaged, and is a critical step for validating our self-driving systems as we work towards returning to our driverless mission.

Self-driving Waymo cars gather in a San Francisco neighborhood, confusing residents

Though Cruise has had the highest number of high-profile San Francisco problems in recent weeks, the second company operating driverless cars in the city—Waymo, owned by Google parent company, Alphabet Inc.—has had more crashes reported nationwide. Between July 2021 and July 2023, Waymo reported 150 crashes to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration compared to Cruise’s 78. In May, a Waymo car killed a small dog in San Francisco while in autonomous mode with a test driver in the front seat. The company called the crash unavoidable and said the car correctly identified the dog but “was not able to avoid contact.” Waymo operates in Phoenix and San Francisco, and says it’s “ramping up” in Los Angeles County and Austin.

News 4/9

Now, we are building on that work to create high-quality semantic maps and gather road information to ensure future operations meet elevated safety and performance targets. And because no two cities are the same, we plan to conduct this manual and supervised driving in multiple cities - starting with Phoenix - to expose our AVs to a diverse set of driving environments and conditions as we prepare for future driverless service. In a media call, Cruise CEO Dan Ammann said to expect more "tangible" progress for its self-driving cars in 2021, but he wouldn't give an update on when a Cruise driverless taxi service would be available to the public. That app-based service was supposed to launch by the end of 2019, but still hasn't happened. Instead, Cruise has been testing its fleet of 300 cars in San Francisco and Michigan since 2015. Some of the strongest opposition comes from the San Francisco police and fire departments.

Cruise offers to pay $112K in fines over allegations it misled regulators about driverless car - NBC Bay Area

Cruise offers to pay $112K in fines over allegations it misled regulators about driverless car.

Posted: Wed, 07 Feb 2024 08:00:00 GMT [source]

Self Driving Car

Cruise ridehail services are not available at this time, but you can join the waitlist to be one of the first. "We don't really need traffic cones to show how vulnerable they are," says the Safe Street Rebel organizer. "...look forward to working with the California DMV to make any improvements and provide any data they need to reinforce the safety and efficiency of our fleet." Another accident happened in the Mission District where a driver ran a red light and crashed into the Cruise vehicle which had stopped in the middle of the intersection.

Technology

In reality, self-driving cars are not "autonomous vehicles," as is often claimed. The gatherings in both cities questioned Gov. Gavin Newsom’s recent veto of a bill that would have required human safety drivers in heavy autonomous trucks — which aren’t on the road yet but could be soon. Cruise and another robotic car pioneer, Waymo, already have been charging passengers for rides in parts of San Francisco in autonomous vehicles with a back-up human driver present to take control if something goes wrong with the technology.

The more we learn from real-world uses of the technology, the greater seems the mismatch between its purported solutions and the problems facing cities. But in making life easier for self-driving cars and the few people likely to benefit, we might make life harder for everyone else. "It's amazing, we love it. Safest thing. My kid loves it. Big life saver," says San Francisco resident Beth Yemane, who has been using Waymo for months during its test phase. DMV officials said that there is no set time frame for a suspension, but that the agency provided Cruise with “the steps needed to apply to reinstate its suspended permits.” It wasn’t immediately clear what those steps would include. Meanwhile, in San Francisco, members of Safe Street Rebel continue to go out at night and stalk the vehicles one cone at a time. "The traffic cone protest is an example of how things in the real world can really confound machines, even ones as sophisticated and finely tuned as this," says Margaret O'Mara, a history professor at the University of Washington who studies the tech industry.

The invisible seafaring industry that keeps the internet afloat

She graduated with a double major in political science and journalism from Northeastern University. Forbes reporters follow company ethical guidelines that ensure the highest quality. Follow Roeloffs for continued coverage of streaming wars, pop culture news and trending topics. Cruise isn't the first company to receive a permit for fully self-driving cars, but it is the first to put them to the test in San Francisco, which Ammann called "one of the craziest driving environments." In a video released Wednesday, Cruise showed off its first fully driverless test on an empty SF street at night.

Teen suspected of torching Waymo car in SF's Chinatown: police

It says Cruise did not disclose information about its car's subsequent “pull-over maneuver” that dragged the woman after the initial impact, and that the DMV only obtained full footage nine days after the crash. This is the first time that Cruise has demonstrated its Level 4 capabilities. Its main rival, Google spinoff Waymo, has been testing its fully driverless vehicles in Phoenix for over a year, and recently announced it would be making its Level 4 taxi service available to more customers. The company had planned to launch a commercial taxi service in 2019 but failed to do so, and it has yet to publicly commit to a new date. They're mostly run by Cruise, which is owned by GM, and Waymo, which is owned by Google parent company Alphabet.

There are few clear federal regulations that set rules for how autonomous vehicles must function, and what standards they must meet before they are tested on public roads. At the federal level, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration gathers mostly self-reported crash data from companies. In California, the DMV issues permits for testing and deployment, and the CPUC regulates commercial passenger service programs.

They accuse Cruise of deploying its self-driving cars during the spring lockdown in defiance of public health orders banning nonessential travel. And they say Cruise isn’t doing enough to keep them safe during these public health crises. Cruise was the fifth company to receive a driverless permit from the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles, the others being Waymo, Nuro, Zoox, and AutoX. Currently, 60 companies have an active permit to test autonomous vehicles with a safety driver in California.

He used open source data for his research, so his findings aren't based specifically on Cruise and Waymo. Wan found that ordinary objects on the road can lead to dangerous driving behavior. Part of this, he says, is because the cars are programmed to be overly conservative. In January, Cruise introduced its driverless ride-sharing prototype, the Origin.