Skip to main content

Robotaxis have a passenger problem that no one thought of

An issue with self-driving cars that apparently no one previously considered has come to light: dozing passengers.

Officials in San Francisco, where Alphabet’s Waymo company and GM-backed Cruise are currently operating robotaxi services as part of ongoing trials, highlighted the problem in a recent letter to the regulator, Wired reported.

Related Videos

Signed by the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, the San Francisco County Transportation Authority, and the Mayor’s Office on Disability, the letter to the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) explained that in the last couple of months alone, there have been three incidents where Cruise staff were compelled to call 911 after a rider in one of its driverless vehicles failed to respond to their calls via the two-way voice link inside the vehicle.

When police and firefighters arrived on the scene, they found nothing more than a dozing passenger enjoying — apparently rather too much — the comforts of a driverless ride.

The story may sound amusing at first, but as the agencies pointed out in their letter to the regulator, such episodes squander not only public money, but also divert important resources away from others who may genuinely require assistance.

The letter is part of a broader effort by the agencies calling on the CPUC regulator to slow the expansion of robotaxi pilot tests in San Francisco until the technology is better prepared, NBC reported.

Besides the issue of snoozing passengers, the letter also cited incidents in the past year where autonomous cars have been causing problems on the roads.

They include one where five Cruise vehicles blocked a city street, preventing a passenger bus from getting through, and causing a delay to the service. The incident was reminiscent of another one that occurred in June last year.

The company’s vehicles have also caused problems with the work of firefighters, for example, driving over hoses as they tried to perform their duties.

There was also the bizarre happening where San Francisco cops took time to work out how to deal with an empty autonomous car that had apparently committed a traffic violation. As officers stood around discussing what to do, the car drove off before parking a short distance away.

Another letter from the same agencies noted that “the large majority” of the reported unplanned vehicle stops involved Cruise cars rather than Waymo ones, but said the low rate of complaints regarding Waymo vehicles “may reflect only a lower volume of Waymo driverless vehicle miles traveled rather than superior Waymo performance — or could reflect both vehicle miles traveled and performance differences.”

The agencies said they are happy for Waymo and Cruise to continue testing their driverless vehicles, but that expansion of such activities should be done at a careful pace and with special conditions to create “the best path toward public confidence in driving automation and industry success in San Francisco and beyond.”

Cruise gained a permit in June last year to use 30 vehicles as robotaxis — sans backup drivers — in designated parts of San Francisco between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. The company more recently received permission to test driverless cars around the clock, though it still needs final approval from the CPUC. A short while later, in November, Waymo also received a permit to offer fully driverless rides to passengers, though, unlike Cruise, Waymo is currently not permitted to charge for such rides.

Editors' Recommendations

Officers confused as they pull over an empty self-driving car
Cruise

In what appears to be the first incident of its kind, police officers recently pulled over a self-driving car with no one inside it.

The incident, which took place on a street in San Francisco earlier this month, was caught on video by a passing pedestrian. It shows several traffic cops pondering about how to handle the incident after stopping the vehicle for failing to have its front lights on while driving at night.

Read more
How a big blue van from 1986 paved the way for self-driving cars
Lineup of all 5 Navlab autonomous vehicles.

In 1986, a blue Chevy van often cruised around the streets of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania near Carnegie Mellon University. To the casual observer, nothing about it appeared out of the ordinary. Most people would pass by it without noticing the camcorder peeking out from its roof, or the fact that there were no hands on the steering wheel.

But if any passerby had stopped to inspect the van and peer into its interior, they would have realized it was no ordinary car. This was the world's first self-driving automobile: A pioneering work of computer science and engineering somehow built in a world where fax machines were still the predominant way to send documents, and most phones still had cords. But despite being stuck in an era where technology hadn't caught up to humanity's imagination quite yet, the van -- and the researchers crammed into it -- helped to lay the groundwork for all the Teslas, Waymos, and self-driving Uber prototypes cruising around our streets in 2022.

Read more
Watch folks react to their first ride in GM Cruise’s driverless car
Two people taking their first ride in an autonomous car.

General Motors autonomous car unit, Cruise, has started to offer driverless rides to residents of San Francisco as it moves toward the launch of a full-fledged robo-taxi service.

Following a test run of the service last week, Cruise has released a video (below) showing the reaction of the very first passengers as they rode through the streets of the Californian city in a vehicle that had nobody behind the wheel.

Read more