Automakers and technology executives have long claimed that self-driving cars will outperform people, but that wasn’t the case for a fleet of Cruise cars in San Francisco this week.
The business, which is majority-owned by General Motors, admitted a “issue earlier this week that caused some of our cars to cluster together.” A firm official stated the issue had been “fixed and no passengers were affected,” but he refused to further.
The Cruise robotaxis, which was obstructing multiple lanes of traffic in San Francisco, was photographed and described on Reddit and Twitter. Late Tuesday night, at least seven Cruise cars were observed clustered near the junction of Gough and Fulton streets in the city’s Civic Center area, possibly obstructing traffic both ways on one of the streets.
It is unknown how long the cars were obstructing traffic or what triggered the incident with the vehicles that are now providing a service to paying clients on several San Francisco streets.
The event demonstrates how difficult it is to create and deploy fleets of self-driving vehicles. Commercializing self-driving cars has been significantly more difficult than many imagined even a few years ago. After years of promoting the technology as the future multitrillion-dollar industry for transportation firms, the obstacles have led to a concentration in the autonomous vehicle business.
According to San Francisco Police Department public relations officer Kathryn Winters, the San Francisco Department of Emergency Management was alerted and contacted Cruise about the matter. She said that no cops were called to the location.
The incident happened about a week after Cruise became the first business to provide public unmanned fared trips in a major metropolis. The cars run on selected streets in San Francisco between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m.
Alphabet-backed Waymo is said to have faced similar issues with the clustering of its autonomous cars in the city. In October, KPIX-TV, a CBS station in San Francisco, reported that Waymo cars were becoming stranded on a dead end street.
Cruise’s issue comes only months after an internet video showed a Cruise automated car being hauled over by authorities. The Cruise vehicle originally pulled over to the side of the road and stopped when the officer approached the driver’s side in the footage, before speeding through a junction and continuing down the road.
