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.
SF News Waymo Can Now Offer Driverless Taxi Rides In SF (But Can't Charge for Them) Joining the likes of General Motors-owned Cruise, Waymo — the Alphabet-owned autonomous car company — is now permitted to give fully self-driven rides in San Francisco after months of testing with drivers behind the wheel.
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 GM Cruise Robotaxis Blocked SF Streets More Frequently Than We Knew, One Night ‘Nearly 60’ Cars Stopped GM Cruise snafus have blocked SF streets with suddenly immobilized self-driving cars at least three times in the last two months, with one incident where almost 60 vehicles stopped, and another where Cruise “lost touch with its entire fleet.”
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 Free Rides In Self-Driving Cruise Taxis Now Available in SF (But You Have to Get On a Waitlist) If you’re sick of looking at those self-driving cars with droids on top of them, now you can get into one and get a free ride instead — but the program seems unlikely to start for weeks or even months.
Business & Tech Waymo Is Suing the California DMV to Keep Its Crash Data Secret Alphabet's self-driving car arm is running up against a roadblock in its path to becoming a fully-fledged autonomous taxi service in California, and that is coming in the form of a legal battle over its crash data.
Business & Tech Tesla Self-Driving Called Out in Full-Page NYT Ad, Which Claims ‘Millions Would Die Every Day’ if Universally Adopted A full-page ad in Sunday’s New York Times declares “We did not sign up our families to be crash test dummies for thousands of Tesla cars,” but the ad is affiliated with a rival self-driving software company.
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 If You Would Like to Hail a Robo-car in San Francisco You Can Do That Now With Waymo Google's self-driving car spinoff Waymo has just launched its autonomous vehicle ride-hailing service Waymo One in San Francisco, with a view toward getting rid of the "safety driver" altogether and letting the robo-cars do all the work.
SF News Detestable Tesla ‘Backseat Driver’ Makes Bail, Buys Another Tesla, Backseat-Drives Again Tesla troll Param Sharma clearly revels in being public enemy No. 1, as he just bought another new Tesla and drove it from the backseat again in front of TV cameras. Also, he would like us to know he is very rich.
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 Tesla Autopilot ‘Backseat Driver’ Scofflaw Spotted Multiple Times on Bay Area Roads What appears to be the same detestable Tesla owner was spotted in the highly illegal, incredibly dangerous, and massively stupid act of sitting in the backseat with the Tesla in autopilot mode.
Business & Tech Trump Pardons Anthony Levandowski, Convicted Thief of Autonomous Vehicle Trade Secrets Former Alphabet employee, Marin County resident and self-driving technology wunderkind Anthony Levandowski was one of 143 people to receive a last-minute pardon from Donald Trump on his way out of the White House.
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 Day Around the Bay: Uber Self-Driving Car Operator Charged In Arizona Killing A federally funded Berkeley lab has stopped its diversity training due to Trump's order, Tom Steyer is selling his Pac Heights mansion for $11 million, and Oregon is being threatened with dry lightning.
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.
Business & Tech Uber’s Self-Driving Volvos Resumed Testing in San Francisco Today They’re only in the Richmond District, with a human safety driver onboard, but the Uber self-driving cars are back in town starting today.
Business & Tech Uber Gets Back in the California DMV's Good Graces With New Self-Driving Car Permit A little over three years after it unleashed some self-driving cars in San Francisco without any legal permit to do so, Uber has just been granted a new permit to test the autonomous vehicles on California streets.
Business & Tech Star Google Engineer Who Left Waymo Team To Launch Uber's Self-Driving Cars Charged With Theft Of Trade Secrets In a federal case dating back to 2017, former Google and Uber engineer Anthony Levandowski was charged this month with 33 counts of theft and attempted theft of trade secrets.
SF News Waymo Very Close To Launching Self-Driving Cars Without Humans Behind Wheel Waymo may be gearing up to get self-driving cars — without human "safety drivers" — on the road by as early as this fall, according to The Information. If this seems a little soon to
SF News Lyft To Offer Free Rides In Self-Driving Cars Later This Year In SF The supposedly kinder, gentler, and self-described “woke” rideshare service Lyft has been feasting on the entrails of scandal-ravaged competitor Uber as of late. But a new self-driving car announcement from Lyft today signifies
SF News Apple Ditches Self-Driving Car Dreams At last count, the roster of tech companies currently developing some sort of self-driving car, or the underlying technology to run one, includes Google, Uber, Tesla, and Lyft, in addition to blue-chip car
