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. Just last week, a California regulator allowed Cruise and Google sister company Waymo to operate driverless taxis 24/7 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.
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. Cruise and Waymo have been driving their robotic cars in San Francisco for years – first with security drivers, but now more and more often 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.