“Anything that we do differently than humans is being sensationalized,” Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt said.
Cruise’s driverless vehicles — part of a mass experiment on San Francisco’s streets that has drawn mixed results and some protests from city leaders — have recently been dinged by state regulators, who opened an investigation last month into a spate of “concerning incidents involving Cruise vehicles in San Francisco.”
While the California Department of Motor Vehicles works on its investigation, it ordered the company to reduce its fleet size in San Francisco by 50 percent — a major setback for the General Motors-owned company.
Vogt said it is an “appropriate cautionary action” for officials to take a closer look at some incidents. But overall, he said, much of the scrutiny on driverless cars is overblown.
“No one has ever been seriously hurt across several million miles of driving and hundreds of thousands of rides provided in San Francisco,” he added.
Cars without drivers have become a common sight in San Francisco, where the winding, hilly and often foggy streets have proved a challenging test ground for the technology. All eyes have been on San Francisco’s rollout of self-driving cars, one of the biggest test cases for a world where many companies — from Amazon to Google — envision a driverless future.
But as dozens of companies test their technology on public roads and investors pour billions of dollars into a “Jetsons”-like future, the self-driving car industry has had a bumpy start. There has been at least one documented fatality by a fully autonomous vehicle when a car operated by Uber struck and killed a pedestrian in Tempe, Ariz., in 2018. Some companies predicted that robotaxis would be widespread by the mid-2020s, but that has yet to materialize.
Meanwhile, in San Francisco, officials here have documented dozens of incidents where self-driving cars — many including Cruise — have disrupted emergency responders.
Despite protests from San Francisco city leaders, the California Public Utilities Commission last month approved permits for Cruise and another self-driving car company, Waymo, to offer 24/7 paid ride-hailing service in San Francisco. City officials immediately filed a motion against the decision, asking regulators to reconsider the expansion, arguing the city “will suffer serious harm” if the companies are allowed unfettered access to the city’s public roads.
Until the DMV investigation is complete, Cruise may only have up to 50 driverless vehicles on the roads during the day and 150 driverless vehicles in operation at night.
Among the notable recent incidents involving Cruise was one in August — just a week after the company was allowed expanded access in San Francisco — where a driverless car entered the intersection of a green light and was struck by a firetruck on its way to an emergency scene. A passenger was treated on scene for “nonsevere” injuries and Cruise said it was investigating the incident.
A few days prior, a car got stuck in wet concrete and had to be retrieved by a Cruise employee. Around the same time, several vehicles stalled in traffic in a busy intersection in a dense neighborhood on a weekend night. The company blamed a music festival — which was roughly four miles away — for jamming up the signal in the area and delayed the response from the company to restart the vehicles.
That incident in particular infuriated public officials, who said it was a prime example of the chaos the companies have caused on the city’s streets.
Vogt, meanwhile, said it caused undue attention: “We’re talking about a 15-minute traffic delay for something that, on the other hand, is providing a massive and quite measurable public benefit to the community.”
Vogt said the software that the vehicles run on is updated every two to four weeks — and sometimes immediately when something more urgent arises. He said that he understands why the driverless cars draw so much curiosity and that it is “healthy” to have such public discourse around the artificial intelligence technology that is “sharing public roads with human drivers.”
But, he said, it is time for the public to eliminate the “double standard” that it has for human drivers and driverless cars, saying that more “mundane” issues — like stopping short in traffic or veering into a bike lane — wouldn’t catch any attention if it was a human driver, but would cause a firestorm if it was a driverless car.
“If I videotaped every single intersection, you see people blowing red lights rolling through stop signs and speeding,” he said. “We’re surrounded by these hazards.”
San Francisco officials feel differently.
In the motion that city officials filed in August asking the state to reconsider its decision to allow Waymo and Cruise to expand their service in San Francisco, officials said incidents involving driverless cars will likely “occur more frequently with expansion and lead to similar (or possibly more serious) harms.”
Phil Koopman, a Carnegie Mellon University professor who has conducted research on autonomous-vehicle safety for decades, said that if the companies continue operating without significant safety improvements it is only a matter of time before a more serious incident occurs.
“These companies are using public roads and putting all the road users at risk with immature tech,” he said. “We’ve gotten to the point where we can live with the way human drivers are, and we have no way to know whether [the driverless cars] will be safer than humans. So why wouldn’t we scrutinize?”
Despite the intense criticism, Vogt, who is also the co-founder of video game streaming service Twitch, is bullish on a future where driverless cars are the default mode of transportation in San Francisco. He said that the deployment of automated cars will ultimately lead to safer roads in a city that experienced a spike of human-driver-related road fatalities in 2022.
Vogt is also under a lot of financial pressure to turn a profit for the company, as Cruise is currently burning a lot of cash. In the first half of 2023 the company lost $1.2 billion, compared to a loss of $900 million in the first half of 2022, according GM’s second-quarter earnings presentation.
As Cruise waits for the DMV to finish its investigation, he said the company is still charging ahead on more upgrades to the technology. For example, he said, it is working on “high-speed” driving so that their cars can expand their service from city streets to the highway. He also said that the company is ironing out the kinks on where and when a car stops to pick up a passenger.
But, he added: “Perfection, when it comes to driving, does not exist.”
