Self-driving cars once seemed like futuristic wonders, however, in tech-savvy San Francisco, autonomous vehicles are now just about everywhere, making deliveries and shuttling passengers.
Questions, however, about safety and how exactly human drivers stack up against their A.I. counterparts don’t always have simple answers. In another incident that snarled up rush hour traffic, a self-driving car shuttling Senior Investigative Reporter Bigad Shaban, swerved, then simply stopped on a major thoroughfare in the Outer Sunset neighborhood, blocking two lanes of traffic for 20 minutes.
Both companies are currently petitioning regulators with the California Public Utilities Commission to expand their robotaxi services in San Francisco, the state’s largest testing ground for autonomous vehicles, so passengers can request rides from their phones, 24 hours a day. For autonomous vehicles in testing, with actual humans inside who can take the wheel, DMV records reveal the human drivers had to override their cars more than 8,000 times last year alone.
While Nicholson acknowledges she and her staff have previously met with representatives from autonomous vehicle companies, those meetings have yet to yield any substantial solutions to the problems, she says, the fire department has repeatedly raised.In San Francisco, cameras have captured self-driving cars getting confused by emergency scenes, sometimes plowing into caution tape, or blocking fire trucks.
“Traffic blockages are not something that we want to have happen, but it’s also one of the realities of living in a very dynamic street with pedestrians and bicyclists, with delivery trucks, with double parked vehicles,” she said. “So we are working to minimize when those things happen.” According to Cruise, its cars have driven more than 3 million miles, and haven’t been involved in a single death or life-threatening injury.The accident involved an autonomous car from Uber, which has since halted its operation of self-driving vehicles. The car, which had a test driver riding along behind the wheel, struck and killed a pedestrian who was jaywalking at about 10pm.
Less than one minute into the ride – and less than two blocks away from our pickup point – there were already signs of trouble.“It’s very confused,” Borges said from the back seat. “Poor thing.”A construction sign up ahead indicated the far-right lane the vehicle was traveling in would be closed and was signaling vehicles to merge into the center lane.