Even after years of testing across the city, self-driving cars in San Francisco are sometimes overwhelmed by unexpected situations. A Cruise robot taxi got stuck in wet concrete during road works on Tuesday. The General Motors subsidiary confirmed to the “SFGate” website that the car had to be pulled out of the construction site. The software obviously couldn’t tell the difference between a slab track and wet concrete.
An eyewitness photo on “SFGate” showed a cruise vehicle with the front wheel stuck deep in the concrete. A traffic cone stood to one side. It was initially unclear how well the construction site was marked.
Since the weekend, more and more robotaxi mishaps have been appearing, which are increasingly calling into question the approval of the regulators. On Friday, Cruise and the Google-Sister company Waymo permitted in principle by a California regulatory authorityto deploy driverless taxis around the clock throughout the city. The city and its transport companies fought back. They argued that the technology was not yet reliable enough and pointed out, among other things, that the vehicles repeatedly blocked traffic due to technical problems.
Broken down Robotaxi causes traffic chaos
At the weekend it was time again: A large music festival caused several cruise vehicles to break down and paralyzed traffic. Cruise pointed out that the mobile network in the district was overloaded because of the event. As a result, the vehicles could not have been diverted by radio. San Francisco police confirmed network congestion.
“We are actively investigating and working on solutions to prevent this from happening again and apologize to those affected,” Cruise said in a statement. Like the newspaper”San Francisco Chronicles
” reported, Cruise is now considering building its own cellular network just for operations in San Francisco.
Cruise and Waymo have been driving their robotic cars in San Francisco for years – initially with security drivers, but now increasingly without a human behind the wheel. They want to switch to specially developed vehicles for the Robotaxi services that have neither steering wheels nor pedals.
San Francisco is a test case for the Robotaxi business model after investing billions in the technology. The vehicles are expensive. They must therefore be as permanently busy as possible and earn money. The Euphoria surrounding autonomous driving subsided
noticeably in recent years. Especially the from the Volkswagen-Hope Argo AI shocked the industry.