Up around midnight On June 28, Calvin Hu was driving with his girlfriend near Golden Gate Park in San Francisco when he stopped at an intersection behind two white and orange autonomous Chevrolet Bolts owned by Cruise, a subsidiary of General Motors. Another was stopped to his right in the adjacent lane. The light turned green, but the cars, driving without drivers in the city, did not move.
As Hu prepared to back up and go around the frozen vehicles, he noticed that more Cruise vehicles had stopped in the lanes behind him. Hu, another driver, and a paratransit bus were trapped in a robotic axi sandwich.
After a few minutes of bewildered wait, Hu says, he resorted to driving over the curbs of the street’s median strip to escape. When he returned on foot a few minutes later to see if the situation had been resolved, the Cruise vehicles hadn’t budged. A person who appeared to work for the company had parked at the intersection, Hu says, as if to signal the street was closed, and tried to divert traffic away from the stationary self-driving cars. Hu estimates that the blockade of the robot car, which has not been previously reported, lasted at least 15 minutes.
The Cruise vehicles that Hu trapped weren’t the only autonomous cars holding up traffic in San Francisco that night. Internal reports seen by WIRED show that nearly 60 vehicles in the city were shut down over a 90-minute period after losing contact with a Cruise server. As many as 20 cars, some of which stopped at zebra crossings, caused a traffic jam in the city center in an incident first reported by police. San Francisco Examiner and detailed in photos posted to Reddit. In a written statement, the California Department of Motor Vehicles, which oversees the state’s autonomous vehicle operations, said it was aware of the incident and would meet with Cruise to “gather additional information.”
The June 28 outage was not Cruise’s first. On the evening of May 18, the company lost contact with its entire fleet for 20 minutes when its cars pulled up in the street, according to internal documentation reviewed by WIRED. Company personnel were unable to see where the vehicles were or communicate with the riders inside. Worst of all, the company couldn’t access its system that allows remote operators to safely steer vehicles to the side of the road.
A letter sent anonymously by a Cruise employee to the California Public Utilities Commission that month, and reviewed by WIRED, claimed the company is losing contact with its driverless vehicles “on a regular basis”, blocking traffic and possibly dispatching emergency vehicles. hinders. The vehicles can sometimes only be recovered with a tow truck, the letter said. Images and video posted to social media in Be able to and June- show Cruise vehicles seemingly inexplicably stopped in San Francisco’s lanes as the city’s pedestrians and motorists navigate around them.
Cruise spokesman Tiffany Testo says the cars that got stuck on May 18 “were able to transition as part of the series of fallback systems Cruise has installed.” She issued a written statement saying that the company’s vehicles are programmed to stop and turn on their hazard lights when they encounter a technical problem or meet road conditions they cannot handle. “We are working to minimize the number of times this happens, but it is and will remain an aspect of our overall safety activities,” the statement said. Testo did not respond to questions about multiple incidents where Cruise vehicles stopped in traffic.
The outages come at a pivotal time for Cruise, which is accelerating its autonomous vehicle program on San Francisco’s tricky streets while competing with well-capitalized rivals such as Google’s Amazon-owned sister company Waymo, Aurora and Zoox. In the spring, General Motors bought the SoftBank Vision Fund’s $2.1 billion stake in Cruise and invested an additional $1.35 billion in the self-driving unit. Just over two weeks after the May outage that froze Cruise’s fleet, the CPUC approved Cruise’s license to charge for Uber-style rides. has invested in building its technology.
