Amanda Hari and Addy Bink
59 minutes ago
SAN FRANCISCO (KRON) — Cruise, San Francisco’s self-driving robotaxi service, has pulled the software from its self-driving cars after a collision that happened in March.
While tech experts tell Nexstar’s KRON the recall is good, what it led to was alarming.
Last month, Cruise’s self-driving robotaxi crashed into a San Francisco city bus.
“Fender benders like this rarely come our way [autonomous vehicles]but this incident was unique,” founder and CEO Kyle Vogt said Friday. “We don’t expect our vehicles to crash into the back of a city bus under any conditions, so even a single incident like this deserved an immediate and careful study”.
He went on to note that “the behavior of the bus was reasonable and predictable” and that the cruiser vehicle “broke in response” but “too late and pulled the bus at 10 mph.”
“The Muni bus is an unusual shape because it has two sections, so movement was not something that was in its sights,” Ahmed Banafa, a professor and technology expert at San Jose State University, told KRON.
The cars use a combination of cameras and radar to operate without a driver. Banafa says companies are still training the software on how to react to different scenarios.
The incident eventually led Cruise to file a voluntary recall with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Vogt explained. Engineers and operations teams were able to identify and push for an upgrade on about 300 cruise cars, according to Vogt, who described alerting NHTSA as a “proactive step.”
“The problem I see is that the training is done on the actual streets,” Banafa said. This is opposed to training the cars in a controlled environment like a closed track.
Before the bus crash, there had been other incidents involving cruiser cars in San Francisco. During a storm in late March, two of the self-driving taxis failed to detect road closure tape and drove briefly into areas blocked by downed trees or power lines.
Guidehouse Insights principal analyst Sam Abuelsamid says there should be more regulations on the technology for these vehicles.
“This is another indicator of what I’ve been advocating for a long time, which is that we shouldn’t allow the companies that develop the software to essentially self-regulate and decide when these vehicles are safe enough to put on the road.” Abuelsamid said. He says there should be federal motor vehicle safety standards and tests as if human drivers were taking a test.
“These automated vehicles operate in much more restricted environments than humans drive, and if you look at the number of accidents per mile, they’re really no better, and in fact, they’re still not as good as human drivers at this moment. stage,” said Abuelsamid.
No one was injured in the crash that led to the recall. Cruise says his tests show this specific problem won’t happen again.
The company is now working to get approval for 24-hour driverless taxis in San Francisco. Currently, the cars only run during off-peak hours.
