SF Politics Friday’s North Beach Self-Driving Car Clusterf*** Has SF Officials Begging the State to Walk Back Approval Barely 24 hours after getting state approval to run their self-driving cars at all hours in SF, Cruise robotaxis froze up en masse in North Beach Friday night. Now SF City Hall is urging a state commission to go into reverse on that approval.
SF News Cruise Cars Get Into Robo-Traffic Jam In North Beach Friday, Caused By Outside Lands-Related 'Connectivity Issues' Just one day after autonomous car expansion was approved in SF, a bunch of Cruise self-driving cars snarled traffic in North Beach Friday night — and it's all on video.
Business & Tech State Commission Votes to Approve Autonomous Taxi Expansion In San Francisco In Historic Vote The California Public Utilities Commission voted 3-1 on Thursday night, after over seven hours of public comment, to approve the expansion of robotaxi service in San Francisco to 24 hours — and approved both Cruise and Waymo to take paid fares at all hours.
Business & Tech Over 200 Members of the Public Set to Give Comment at PUC Hearing on Robotaxis The hearing on expanding autonomous-vehicle taxi service in San Francisco has gotten underway at the California Public Utilities Commission — and a long line of attendees and possible speakers during the public-comment portion was visible at Van Ness and McAllister on Thursday morning.
SF News Cops, Firefighters, and of Course Taxi Drivers Tee Off on Self-Driving Robotaxis Before Key Regulatory Vote Firefighters complain “it is not our job to babysit their vehicles” as Cruise and Waymo road glitches are on the uptick ahead of Thursday’s CPUC vote on whether to allow more robotaxis in SF. Oh, and Willie Brown is now a lobbyist for Cruise.
SF News Another Waymo Decided to Park In the Middle of an Intersection, Blocking Muni Bus You've heard a lot of these stories by now, but we have yet another situation in which a robocar disrupted civil society in San Francisco and caused actual humans to have trouble getting where they need to go.
SF News SF Fire Chief Fumes Over Self-Driving Robotaxis Blocking First Responders Dozens of Times This Year San Francisco Fire Department Chief Jeanine Nicholson notes there have been 39 incidents of Cruise and Waymo robotaxis blocking first responders this year alone, and says the robot cars are “not ready for prime time.”
Business & Tech GM Recalled 300 Cruise Robocars Following Crash Into Muni Bus An incident in which a Cruise robotaxi made a booboo and "tapped" the back of a Muni bus in the Haight last month has prompted General Motors to do a "recall" — which in the days of internet-connected vehicles just amounted to a software update.
SF News SF Regulators Have Had It With Self-Driving Cruise, Waymo Mishaps, Ask State To Halt Expansion In light of 92 incidents in seven months of self-driving Cruise and Waymo cars stopping, idling, and causing havoc on San Francisco streets, the SF County Transportation Authority is asking the state to hold off on giving them more expanded permits.
Business & Tech Self-Driving Waymo Drives Self Into Construction Site, Doesn’t Know What To Do The latest San Francisco driverless car mishap involves an autonomous Waymo vehicle driving upon a construction site, stopping in front of a trench in the ground, then having no idea what to do as construction workers have a good laugh at the robot car’s confused state.
Business & Tech Tesla In Self-Driving Mode Blamed For Eight-Car Pileup On Bay Bridge We are now learning that a Thanksgiving Day multi-car crash that injured nine people is being blamed on a Tesla in “full self-driving” mode, as the Tesla reportedly came to an abrupt stop after a lane change, causing a chain-reaction pileup in the Yerba Buena tunnel.
Business & Tech Now the Feds Are Looking Into Why All Those Cruise Robotaxis Went Rogue and Swarmed on Gough Street GM's self-driving taxi arm Cruise will have to answer to federal safety regulators who are now rightfully concerned about several incidents in which the robot cars decided to stop in the middle of streets and block human drivers from getting past, or randomly brake quickly and cause collisions.
Business & Tech GM Cruise Self-Driving Vehicles Have Been Involved in Nine Hit-and-Runs This Year There’s no evidence that the self-driving cars were at fault in these accidents, but there is a very clear pattern that when people realize they’ve been in an accident with a car that has no driver, they just drive right away.
Business & Tech Flock of GM Cruise Self-Driving Cars Just Plain Stop Working, Block Gough Street ‘For a Couple of Hours’ The latest self-driving car mishap comes courtesy of a cluster of GM Cruise driverless taxis that simply stopped in their tracks “for a couple of hours” Wednesday night and had to be manually pushed off the street by GM employees.
SF News Report: SFPD Already Using Surveillance Video From Self-Driving Cars An internal SFPD document obtained by VICE News shows that not only can the SF Police Department pull the camera video from autonomous Waymo and Cruise cars, but more chillingly, that they have “already done this several times.”
Business & Tech Jokes and Some Outrage Drive Themselves on Twitter In Wake of Driverless Cruise Cab Pulled Over by Cops It has been a long, inevitable road to get to the point where even law enforcement is visibly flummoxed on what to do with an AV that isn't following the rules of the road.
Business & Tech Video: SF Cops Try to Pull Over Driverless Cruise Taxi, Hilarity Ensues All haters of the ersatz training course for robot cars that San Francisco's streets have become are having a field day with a new video, posted earlier this month, showing an autonomous Cruise taxi in the Richmond District getting pulled over by the SFPD with no driver inside.
Sponsored Self-Driving Trucks At SF Moving Companies Could One Day Contribute To Loss Of 500K Long-Haul Jobs Nationwide A new study from the University of Michigan says self-driving trucks could be the solution to the trucker shortage, replacing as many as 500,000 long-haul trucking jobs. Last-mile delivery, like local SF movers, might follow suit, too. [SPONSORED]
Business & Tech State Grants First Permits to Waymo and Cruise For Paid Self-Driving Taxi Service The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) has granted its first, semi-full permits to Alphabet-owned Waymo and General Motors-owned Cruise to provide autonomous-vehicle taxi service to paid passengers.
Business & Tech Why Are Waymo's Self-Driving Cars Constantly Hitting the Same Dead End On 15th Avenue? Neighbors on one street in San Francisco's Richmond District seem to be witnessing the training of robot cars in the art of the three-point turn — over, and over, and over again.
Business & Tech Tesla 'Backseat Driver' Nabbed By CHP A man who had been seen multiple times on Bay Area roads happily sitting in the backseat of his Tesla while it drove him places on Autopilot has been arrested by California Highway Patrol. But it sounds like no lessons have been learned.
Business & Tech Amazon’s Cartoonish Self-Driving Taxi Prematurely Debuts in Union Square Zoiks! The new Zoox self-driving taxicab from Amazon was spotted in SF this past weekend, more than a week before its scheduled public debut.
Business & Tech Waymo Has Taken Its Self-Driving Fleet Off SF Streets Out of Concern For Post-Election Chaos Safety drivers who are piloting Waymo's self-driving cars around San Francisco as part of a testing program that has been ongoing for several years were instructed on Monday to bring the vehicles back to Mountain View.
Business & Tech Waymo Unleashes ‘Fully Driverless’ Taxis (In Phoenix Only), Elon Musk Stews With Jealous Tweets The Google-Alphabet-Waymo dream of fully autonomous taxicabs is a reality as of today, but only in a small patch of the Phoenix, Arizona area.
Business & Tech Self-Driving Car Company Cruise Using Food Bank Deliveries To Get Around Shelter-In-Place Restrictions In the long list of business operations now allowed in San Francisco, autonomous-vehicle testing isn't included. But Cruise, a self-driving car service headquartered in SOMA, is using their cars for an essential service — food delivery — to sidestep current shelter-in-place restrictions.
