- Cruise recalled its entire driverless car fleet after they were banned in California following a fatality.
- Now other driverless car companies are facing questions over the safety of their vehicles.
- Unions claim all driverless cars are “unsafe” and called for investigations into Waymo and Beep.
Cruise’s robotaxi rollout in San Francisco has turned into a fiasco, with the driverless car firm facing growing questions over just how safe its vehicles really are.
Cruise is already being investigated by the federal government and California regulators — and there are also calls for other companies testing driverless cars on public roads to be examined.
In a letter to Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, transportation unions called for investigations into other companies operating autonomous vehicles, such as Google-owned Waymo.
“Automated driving system-equipped vehicle operations are unsafe and untenable in their current form,” the letter stated. “This industry is in dire need of federal regulation and leadership to restore a modicum of safety and establish a realistic path for these vehicles to operate without threatening other road users.”
The unions argued that the growing presence of automated vehicles on public roads was putting workers at risk.
They highlighted the “chaotic and dangerous” expansion of Cruise’s robotaxi service in San Francisco, saying Cruise vehicles had blocked emergency responders and posed hazards to sanitation workers. The letter also pointed to similar incidents involving vehicles operated by Waymo and Beep.
Waymo has expanded its own robotaxi services to Phoenix, Austin, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, and averages about 10,000 passengers a week.
The sector now faces possibly its biggest challenge yet after Cruise recalled its entire fleet in the wake of a California ban. It was triggered by a grisly accident in which a pedestrian was dragged 20 feet under one of its driverless cars.
Cruise’s recall has sparked renewed scrutiny of the decision to allow the driverless car company and its rival Waymo to operate their robotaxi services in San Francisco 24/7.
California state Sen. David Cortese has launched a public inquiry into the permitting process for autonomous vehicles in the state, and has suggested that regulations need to be tightened to prevent future accidents.
“We need clear regulations that keep pace with technology, creating innovation while protecting public safety and addressing issues like sudden starts and stops, traffic blockage, and cooperation with our first responders on the road,” he said.
The industry now faces pressure to guarantee the safety of its vehicles — but the way Cruise’s vehicles have struggled to adapt to driving in dense city environments is further evidence of how difficult it is to produce truly driverless vehicles that don’t never human input.
The robotaxis operated by the likes of Cruise and Waymo aspire to this level of autonomy, but can only drive themselves in certain circumstances and locations.
Cruise has admitted that its vehicles require regular interventions from humans working in remote operations centers, and they still struggle to deal with rare events.
Gavin Jackson, the boss of UK-based self-driving startup Oxa, previously told Insider that the key barrier to fully self-driving cars was the inability to collect enough data to train cars to deal with these kind of situations.
“There’s only so much data that you can collect from physically driving around,” he said.
“And the amount of data that you collect is nowhere near good enough, if you will, to cater for the near-infinite things that could happen when you’re out driving.”
Jackson said reaching this “holy grail” of driverless technology was a monumental challenge likely to take “decades” to achieve.
“The ultimate goal is to have software that has the experience, the knowledge, and the expertise to drive everywhere,” he said. “When it comes to generalized AI that can do that, we’re so far away from that.”
Cruise and Waymo did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Insider.
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