cruise automation traffic jam

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Cruise Robotaxis Cause Austin Street Gridlock Due to ‘Heavy’ Pedestrian Traffic

Residents in Austin, Texas are fed up with Cruise-induced traffic jams—just like Californians.

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Robotaxis haven't enjoyed the best public image over the past year. From unmanned traffic jams to protestors condoning straight-up vandalism against cars , both Cruise and Waymo have had a rough start in San Francisco. So much so that the officials who granted them seemingly unfettered access to the city have reined in the driverless cars to avoid further public outcry, at least for the time being.

Over the weekend, photos and videos of yet another Cruise-induced robotaxi traffic jam spread across X (formerly Twitter). However, unlike the past incidents that have occurred largely in San Francisco, this one wasn't in California. Instead, it was in another of the country's tech hubs and in Tesla's backyard : Austin, Texas.

About 20 Cruise-operated Chevrolet Bolts were seen stuck up and down San Gabriel Street late Saturday night. Some had shifted into the oncoming side of the two-lane street, even forcing a pair of Cruise cars to face one another in some sort of autonomous stand-off, blocking traffic even further.

The actual cause of the jam remains unknown, though it's not uncommon for Cruise vehicles to become stuck and require human intervention—also known as a Vehicle Recovery Event. The individual who posted the photos and videos said they observed the Cruise workers trying to operate the cars via remote control to remediate the situation. A spokesperson hinted that the problem may have been related to pedestrian traffic, though the footage circulating social media does not show an abundance of people nearby during the gridlock.

"Foot and vehicle traffic on the street was heavy," said a Cruise spokesperson in a statement to The Drive . "Our cars are designed first and foremost to prioritize safety—and that includes using caution around pedestrians."

The spokesperson continued: "Cruise continuously monitors its fleet, and we were alerted to a crowding event on Sunday morning. We were able to address it and all vehicles departed the area autonomously. We apologize for any inconvenience."

Local news channel KVUE also outlined a separate incident that occurred earlier this week involving a Cruise vehicle stopped in an intersection. That incident caught the eye of Austin City Council Member Zohaib Qadri. Qadri called both incidents "a mess" and expressed plans to voice his safety concerns at the next mobility council meeting .

This isn't the first time that Cruise vehicles have drawn the ire of untrusting residents. Back in January, a driverless car was observed turning into a bike lane . And during another incident, cars were observed treating small residential neighborhoods as throughways. While legal, it caused an unnecessary nuisance to residents who told KXAN that they'd seen as many as 25 cars in a 20-minute span.

The reason, according to Cruise, is that its cars are limited to traveling at 25 mph, so its routes are limited to specific roads—like those in residential neighborhoods. But that's not the only complaint.

The cars have also gotten stuck in crosswalks , at green lights , in intersections , and even played chicken with other Cruise vehicles . In fact, just have a look at the r/Austin subreddit and you'll quickly see how the self-driving experiment has tested the patience of locals.

"There's no city or county anything that is regulating them or overseeing what they are doing," said Travis County Judge Andy Brown, who once hailed a robotaxi and noted in that earlier KXAN report that his car pulled over and stopped in the street midway through the journey. "And the fact that it's in a testing phase but there's not the safeguard of a human in the front concerns me."

City council members are powerless, and the Austin Transportation and Public Works Department can't really do anything to stop Cruise from operating on its streets. Earlier this month, the department issued a memo noting that " Texas cities cannot regulate autonomous vehicles " as their authority is preempted by state law .

But that hasn't stopped residents from complaining about blocked intersections and interference with emergency services . The department has since reached out to equivalent bodies in Phoenix, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington D.C. for advice.

"At the end of the day, we're not perfect," said Michael Staples, Cruise's General Manager for the Austin region, to KXAN . "There will be situations where the vehicle will experience something where it's uncertain of what to do next. So when it doesn't know what to do, it will default to its safest action, which is pulling over."

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Aarian Marshall

Cruise’s Robot Car Outages Are Jamming Up San Francisco

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Around midnight on June 28, Calvin Hu was driving with his girlfriend near San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park when he pulled up at an intersection behind two white and orange autonomous Chevrolet Bolts operated by Cruise, a subsidiary of General Motors . Another was stopped to his right in the adjacent lane. The light turned green but the cars, which operate in the city without drivers , didn’t move.

When Hu prepared to reverse and go around the frozen vehicles, he says, he noticed that several more Cruise vehicles had stopped in the lanes behind him. Hu, another driver, and a paratransit bus were trapped in a robotaxi sandwich.

After a few minutes of bemused waiting, Hu says, he resorted to driving over the curbs of the street’s median to escape. When he returned on foot a few minutes later to see whether the situation had resolved, the Cruise vehicles hadn’t budged. A person who appeared to work for the company had parked in the intersection, Hu says, as if to indicate the street was closed, and was trying to direct traffic away from the immobile self-driving cars. Hu estimates that the robot car blockade, which has not previously been reported, lasted at least 15 minutes.

The Cruise vehicles that trapped Hu weren’t the only autonomous cars holding up traffic in San Francisco that night. Internal messages seen by WIRED show that nearly 60 vehicles were disabled across the city over a 90-minute period after they lost touch with a Cruise server. As many as 20 cars, some of them halted in crosswalks, created a jam in the city’s downtown in an incident first reported by the San Francisco Examiner and detailed in photos posted to Reddit. In a written statement the California Department of Motor Vehicles, which oversees the state's autonomous vehicle operations, said it was aware of the incident and would meet with Cruise to “gather additional information.”

The June 28 outage wasn’t Cruise’s first. On the evening of May 18, the company lost touch with its entire fleet for 20 minutes as its cars sat stopped in the street, according to internal documentation viewed by WIRED. Company staff were unable to see where the vehicles were located or communicate with riders inside. Worst of all, the company was unable to access its system which allows remote operators to safely steer stopped vehicles to the side of the road.

A letter sent anonymously by a Cruise employee to the California Public Utilities Commission that month, which was reviewed by WIRED, alleged that the company loses contact with its driverless vehicles “with regularity,” blocking traffic and potentially hindering emergency vehicles . The vehicles can sometimes only be recovered by tow truck, the letter said. Images and video posted on social media in May and June show Cruise vehicles stopped in San Francisco traffic lanes seemingly inexplicably, as the city’s pedestrians and motorists navigate around them.

By Alex Davies and Aarian Marshall

Cruise spokesperson Tiffany Testo says that the cars stuck on May 18 “were able to move over as part of the suite of fallback systems Cruise has in place.” She provided a written statement that said the company’s vehicles are programmed to pull over and turn on their hazard lights when they encounter a technical problem or meet road conditions they can’t handle. “We’re working to minimize how often this happens, but it is and will remain one aspect of our overall safety operations,” the statement said. Testo did not respond to questions about multiple incidents in which Cruise vehicles stopped in traffic.

The outages come at a vital time for Cruise, which is accelerating its autonomous vehicle program on the tricky streets of San Francisco as it competes with well-capitalized rivals like Google’s sister company Waymo , Aurora, and Zoox, which is owned by Amazon. In the spring, General Motors bought out the SoftBank Vision Fund’s $2.1 billion stake in Cruise and invested another $1.35 billion into the self-driving unit. Just over two weeks after the May outage that froze Cruise’s fleet, the CPUC approved Cruise’s permit to charge money for Uber-like ride-hail rides—opening a path to a full commercial robotaxi service that could help the company start to recover the billions it has poured into building its technology.

Matt Jancer

David Nield

Cruise began testing its autonomous technology in San Francisco in 2015, with safety drivers behind the wheel to intervene if something went wrong. Five years later, the DMV granted approval for the company to test its cars without humans onboard. Early this year, Cruise invited members of the public to apply to join a select group of testers in the city, who can summon completely driverless rides with an app. The service is available between 10 pm and 6 am, and covers 70 percent of the city, but isn’t permitted to operate in rain and fog.

Around midnight on June 21, nearly two weeks after Cruise won permission to charge for rides, San Francisco resident Stephen Merity was walking through the city’s Tenderloin neighborhood when he saw a driverless Cruise stopped in a crosswalk, blocking a right-hand turn lane. When he returned a few minutes later, he found two more Cruise vehicles stopped behind the first. When another driverless car appeared and started to navigate around its stuck brethren, an apparently inebriated bystander cheered it on: “You can do it!”

Late one night in June, Stephen Merity encountered three autonomous cars stuck in downtown San Francisco.

Merity and the robot’s cheerleader told a human driver patiently waiting between two of the motionless Cruise vehicles that she should steer her SUV around the robotaxis. The vehicles had been stuck for at least 10 minutes before he left to go home, Merity says.

The scene initially struck Merity, who works in machine learning, as pretty funny. But after more reflection, he turned anxious about the technology. When he saw a news report about the June 28 outage, he was dismayed. “I had assumed alarm bells were going off at Cruise HQ, and they were thinking of pulling the cars off the road and putting drivers back in,” Merity says.

Losing connection with its vehicles, and especially its backup safety systems, might violate Cruise’s permits to operate in California, says Bryant Walker Smith, an associate professor at the South Carolina School of Law who studies autonomous vehicles. The California DMV program that regulates driverless cars requires a vehicle’s operator to certify that it has a link allowing for “two-way communications” between a vehicle—including its passengers—and an employee remotely overseeing the robot’s movements. However, much like autonomous cars themselves, regulations drawn up to apply to the vehicles have not been tested in every possible scenario.

Cruise did not respond to specific questions about its permits. Neither the California DMV nor the CPUC would say how Cruise’s permits might be affected by the outage incidents. The CPUC did not say whether it had responded to the anonymous Cruise employee’s letter, or taken its contents into consideration before approving the company’s permit.

Regardless of Cruise’s legal obligations, Walker Smith says that self-driving companies should be open and transparent about what’s happening on public roads. “From the perspective of the public, when the vehicles do something wrong or weird, it’s on the company—the ‘driver’—to really explain it.”

Screens inside autonomous vehicles stuck near an intersection in downtown San Francisco urged first responders to contact Cruise.

People who have seen Cruise’s vehicles on the streets of San Francisco, or have ridden in the cars, say the robotaxis generally avoid the busiest streets. Rodney Brooks, an MIT roboticist and entrepreneur , signed up for Cruise’s taxi service via the company's online public portal . In May, he and a friend took a series of nighttime rides throughout northern San Francisco. On one trip, Brooks noticed that their driverless taxi went at least 11 blocks farther than necessary, roughly half a mile, apparently to avoid the most crowded roads. The journeys were mostly smooth, Brooks says, though one car he summoned stopped alongside a construction site, forcing him and his friend to walk through traffic to get into the car.

For Brooks, robotaxis getting stuck in and blocking traffic is evidence of the challenges faced by Cruise and its competitors as they try to turn promising prototype autonomous vehicles into large-scale commercial services. “A lot of technologists think if you do a demo, then that’s it. But scaling is what kills you,” he says. “You run into all sorts of things that didn’t happen at a smaller scale.

Incidents of Cruise losing touch with its vehicles appear to have caused inconvenience, not injuries. Some have enjoyed the spectacle. One night in May, Scott Gatz was caught behind four stopped Cruise vehicles at the same intersection where Hu would be trapped weeks later. A city worker approached the vehicles, looking confused, Gatz says, and later a man with a tablet arrived who appeared to work for Cruise.

Gatz and other drivers escaped that night by squeaking through a small gap to the side of the robot vehicles. “Cruise really needs to fix its software, and we as a city need to figure out how we can coexist with these cars,” Gatz says—but he’s still glad to see the technology tested in San Francisco. His 12-year-old son, who was in the car with him that night, thought the whole thing was pretty fun.

Operating large, heavy robots around humans inevitably comes with some danger. On June 3, the day after the company received its permit to charge for rides in California, a Cruise vehicle making a left turn in front of traffic was struck by an oncoming Toyota Prius. A Cruise employee in the car and the Prius driver both had to seek medical treatment, according to a report filed by the company with the DMV, in line with a requirement to report all autonomous vehicle-related crashes. The report said the Cruise vehicle had stopped in the intersection before completing its turn, and that the Prius had sped straight through its right turn lane into the motionless robot.

In response to that crash, Cruise temporarily reprogrammed its vehicles to make fewer unprotected left turns, according to internal messages seen by WIRED. At an internal meeting Jeff Bleich, Cruise’s chief legal officer, said the company was investigating the incident, according to a recording reviewed by WIRED. He also warned employees not working on that investigation to try and tune out crashes or related news reports, saying they were unavoidable and would increase in frequency as the company scaled up its operations. “We just have to understand that at some point this is now going to be a part of the work that we do, and that means staying focused on the work ahead,” he said.

On Thursday, the National Highway Traffic Safety Agency said it would open a special investigation into the crash. In a statement, Testo, the Cruise spokesperson, said the company is “proud” of its safety record, “and it speaks for itself.” Updated 7/8/2022 9:45 pm ET This article has been updated with additional comment from Cruise about an incident in May in which the company lost contact with its autonomous vehicles.

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San Francisco’s North Beach streets clogged as long line of Cruise robotaxis come to a standstill

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One day after California green-lighted a massive expansion of driverless robotaxis in San Francisco, the implications became clear.

At about 11 p.m. Friday, as many as 10 Cruise driverless taxis blocked two narrow streets in the center of the city’s lively North Beach bar and restaurant district. All traffic came to a standstill on Vallejo Street and around two corners on Grant. Human-driven cars sat stuck behind and in between the robotaxis, which might as well have been boulders: no one knew how to move them.

The cars sat motionless with parking lights flashing for 15 minutes, then woke up and moved on, witnesses said.

A pedestrian counts 10 Cruise robotaxis bricked in North Beach late Friday night.

Aaron Peskin, who represents North Beach on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, fears what could happen when a major fire or other life-threatening emergency breaks out with multiple robotaxis blocking the way. “Our houses in North Beach are made of sticks,” he said. Peskin was flooded with texts, emails and videos from constituents as the robotaxis, programmed with artificial intelligence software, sat unresponsive. In one video, zeroing in on a robotaxi’s “driver” seat, a man says “this is what our country has come to.”

Cruise blamed cellphone carriers for the problem. At 11:01 p.m. Friday, Peskin sent a text message to Cruise government affairs manager Lauren Wilson. At 8:25 a.m. Saturday, she texted back: “As I understand it, outside lands impacted LTE cell connectivity and ability for RA advisors to route cars.” Outside Lands is a three-day music festival held in Golden Gate Park, four miles from North Beach.

Massive expansion of driverless robotaxis approved for San Francisco despite public safety concerns

Gov. Gavin Newsom’s California Public Utilities Commission on Thursday approved a measure to let robotaxi companies Cruise and Waymo massively expand deployment of their driverless vehicles on San Francisco streets.

Aug. 10, 2023

The situation is loaded with irony, as the California Public Utilities Commission on Thursday voted 3 to 1 amid great public controversy to allow a massive robotaxi expansion. The vote allows General Motors-owned Cruise and Waymo, owned by Google’s Alphabet, to charge fares for driverless service and grow the fleet as large as they’d like. Cruise has said it plans eventually to deploy thousands of robotaxis in San Francisco.

City officials in San Francisco, from the mayor’s office down, have been fighting the move, with officials saying the robotaxi industry needs to fix problems that endanger the public first before further expanding the business. The city’sFire Department has logged more than 55 cases of robotaxis interfering with first responders. Fire Chief Jeanine Nicholson has repeatedly said Cruise and Waymo are getting in firefighters’ way and their technology is “not ready for prime time.”

San Francisco’s fire chief is fed up with robotaxis that mess with her firetrucks. And L.A. is next

As robotaxi companies plan to provide service in Los Angeles, San Francisco officials battle with state regulators over robotaxi safety.

June 22, 2023

The CPUC decided to go ahead anyway. One of the three yes votes was cast by Commissioner John Reynolds, who served as head lawyer at Cruise before appointed to the CPUC by Gov. Gavin Newsom.

The no vote came from Commissioner Genevieve Shiroma, who said the companies should explain the problems and how they plan to fix them first.

North Beach resident Jeffrey Bilbrey observes the line of bricked robotaxis from his apartment window. ‘This is what our country’s come to,’ says a man inspecting a stranded robotaxi.

Peskin said city officials are pursuing “every means” to have the CPUC decision reversed, and are discussing whether to seek a court injunction. Another option: fining Cruise and Waymo thousands of dollars for each robotaxi road blockage.

The CPUC, and Gov. Gavin Newsom, in Peskin’s view, are putting big money ahead of basic public safety. The CPUC “has not been held in high esteem by the people of California for a very long time,” Peskin said. All five CPUC commissioners were appointed by Newsom, including the former Cruise attorney.

“If you’re looking for an example of regulatory capture, you’re seeing it now,” Peskin said. “It’s unethical and immoral but legal,” he said. “Bottom line, this all goes to Gov. Gavin Christopher Newsom.”

Representatives for Newsom and the CPUC could not be immediately reached for comment. In a Twitter post Saturday, Cruise said, “We are actively investigating and working on solutions to keep this from happening again.”

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10 confused Cruise robotaxis create an autonomous traffic jam in San Francisco

Lack of wireless bandwidth was the culprit, and a critic says that's an ominous issue.

On Friday, the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco was briefly clogged with traffic after autonomous taxis froze at a busy intersection. The jam consisted of at least 10 driverless Chevy Bolts operated by Cruise, General Motors ' self-driving car subsidiary. 

"One of them was stopped at the top of the hill for no apparent reason," witness Valerie Jacobson told NBC Bay Area .

The mishap coincided with a music festival taking place in nearby Golden Gate Park. Cruise blamed the festival for interfering with network connections to the cars.

"A large festival posed wireless bandwidth constraints causing delayed connectivity to our vehicles. We are actively investigating and working on solutions to prevent this from happening again. We apologize to those who were impacted," said a statement put out by Cruise on social media.

The cluster comes just a day after the state's Public Utilities Commission ruled 3-1 in favor of letting Cruise and Waymo expand their driverless taxi operations . Waymo is owned by Alphabet, parent company of Google, and uses Jaguar I-Pace electric crossovers . The ruling allowed the companies to conduct robotaxi operations 24/7 throughout San Francisco.

San Francisco Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin cautioned that "these things are not ready for prime time," when speaking to NBC Bay Area. "[It's] scary as heck if you think about the fact that moving these vehicles out of traffic requires cell service," he added.

Peskin pointed out that cell service disruption could occur because of a natural disaster. In a situation like that the driverless cars could prevent emergency vehicles from getting through, or block evacuation routes. In an interview with ABC7 San Francisco , he drove the point home: "If there's a power outage or if there's a natural disaster like we just saw in Lahaina that these cars could congest our streets at the precise time when we would be needing to deploy emergency apparatus."

Though the traffic jam cleared after about 20 minutes, this isn't the first time robotaxis have caused confusion in situations that human drivers would have been able to figure out in seconds. When a robotaxi encounters a confusing situation, it seems to default to simply stopping.

In April, a Cruise robotaxi collided with a city bus , and another was unable to follow a police officer's instructions to pull over. A similar Cruise traffic jam of eight vehicles blocked city streets for hours last summer, but the cause was never explained. Last December, NHTSA opened an investigation into Cruise for its vehicles' greater-than-average rate of hard braking and immobilization.

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Cruise’s robotaxis have driven 1 million miles with nobody behind the wheel

San francisco's chaotic streets are giving the company tons of driving data..

For autonomous vehicle developers, every mile driven serves as proof that their technology works and as an opportunity to gather data for further improvement. Which is why Cruise, which has just announced that it has completed 1 million fully driverless miles, calls the achievement one of its biggest milestones yet. A spokesperson told us that those were miles driven with no safety driver behind the wheel and that most of them were collected in San Francisco.

If you'll recall, the GM subsidiary started testing fully driverless rides in the city back in November 2021 . It was also the first company to ever receive a driverless deployment permit from the California Public Utilities Commission, allowing it to charge passengers for robotaxi rides by June last year. Based on the disengagement reports it submitted to the California DMV, it only had around 30 cars or so operating at the beginning of 2022. CNN said it was maintaining a fleet of 100 vehicles by September last year and was seeking to add 5,000 more.

Mo Elshenawy, Cruise's EVP of engineering, said each one of those miles "has been packed with complex scenarios that have set Cruise up for rapid scale." Since San Francisco streets are often chaotic and packed with people, the company was able to gather tons of useful data it can use to better its technology. "For example," Elshenawy wrote in a blog post, "stop sign blow-throughs are 46x times more frequent in San Francisco than in suburban areas."

Cruise has been feeding data from each drive into a continuous learning machine that creates millions of permutations of real-world scenarios on the road. That allows the technology to learn from simulated drives and then apply what it learns in real life. "When you consider our safety record, the gravity of our team’s achievement comes into sharper focus," Elshenawy continued. "To date, riders have taken tens of thousands of rides in Cruise AVs. In the coming years, millions of people will experience this fully driverless future for themselves."

Cruise's announcement comes almost a month after San Francisco officials sent a letter to California regulators, asking them to slow Cruise's (and Waymo's) expansion plans. They reportedly wanted a better understanding of autonomous vehicles first and were worried about "the hazards and network impacts caused by planned and unplanned AV stops that obstruct traffic." As The New York Times said in a recent report, stalled Cruise and Waymo vehicles have caused traffic jams in San Francisco several times in the past. Officials believe these companies have to significantly improve their technologies before expanding, or else they "could quickly exhaust emergency response resources and could undermine public confidence in all automated driving technology."

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Cruise robotaxis blocked traffic for hours on this San Francisco street

More than a half dozen Cruise robotaxis stopped operating and sat in a street in San Francisco late Tuesday night, blocking traffic for a couple of hours until employees arrived and manually moved the autonomous vehicles.

Photos and a description of the Cruise robotaxi blockade were shared to a Reddit post on a subreddit about happenings in the city.

The cars appear to have been stalled at the intersection of Gough and Fulton Streets.

The mishap comes less than a week after Cruise launched its first fully driverless, commercial robotaxi service in the city. Cruise’s vehicles are initially operating between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. on designated streets and without a human safety operator behind the wheel. The Reddit post subsequently made the rounds on Twitter.

Some @Cruise robotaxis appeared to be stuck in SF last night at the corner of Gough St. and Fulton St. Human ops apparently had to rescue them. Still some kinks to iron out. pic.twitter.com/eXDocjVfHU — Taylor Ogan (@TaylorOgan) June 30, 2022

“The first thing I say to my co-worker is that they’re getting together to murder us,” wrote the OP. “It was a pretty surreal event. Humans had to come and manually take the cars away. Cruise should get fined to shit for blocking the street off for so long. They even made it so the street sweeper couldn’t hit an entire block.”

Fines for blocking the street sweeper are around $76 per car in San Francisco . The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Authority (SFMTA) did not respond to TechCrunch’s requests for more information about how it handles such situations with autonomous vehicles and whether Cruise will receive any fines for blocking the intersection.

The issue calls into question the policy cities need to build around autonomous vehicles when they break the law, as well as Cruise’s own operational protocol for these types of incidents.

In April, a Cruise car was pulled over by a police officer because its headlights had malfunctioned. An Instagram video of the event shows the car pulling over when signaled to do so, but when the cop tried to open the driver-side door, the vehicle drove off and then pulled over a little way down the road and activated its hazards. The cop then approached the vehicle again. No citation was issued.

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Cruise halts robotaxi services nationwide in bid to ‘earn public trust’

Cruise is pausing its autonomous fleet across the us, but claims the halt ‘isn’t related to any new on-road incidents.’.

By Jess Weatherbed , a news writer focused on creative industries, computing, and internet culture. Jess started her career at TechRadar, covering news and hardware reviews.

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Cruise, the autonomous vehicle operator backed by General Motors, says it decided to “proactively pause” its fleet of driverless cars across the United States. The operations halt comes just two days after Californian regulators suspended Cruise’s robotaxi permit in the state, claiming that its vehicles “are not safe for public operation.”

Earlier this month, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration announced that it was investigating Cruise after receiving reports of pedestrian injuries involving the company’s driverless vehicles. One notable incident that occurred on October 2nd in San Francisco resulted in a woman becoming pinned under a Cruise robotaxi after being struck by another driver and thrown into the path of the autonomous vehicle.

In a post on X (formerly Twitter), Cruise said it will examine the company’s tools, systems, and processes, and discern how it can “better operate in a way that will earn public trust.” The robotaxi service claims that the decision to pause business “isn’t related to any new on-road incidents,” and that supervised autonomous vehicle operations will continue. “We think it’s the right thing to do during a period when we need to be extra vigilant when it comes to risk, relentlessly focused on safety, & taking steps to rebuild public trust,” the company said . 

Prior to the pause, Cruise operated its driverless robotaxi services in Austin, Phoenix, and Houston. The company has also been conducting autonomous driving tests across other regions like Miami, San Francisco, and Dallas , and had plans to expand to Seattle and Washington DC .

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Cruise Control

A major robotaxi company was all over san francisco—and poised to go national. california just banned it..

Update, Oct. 26, 2023, at 10:08 p.m.: Cruise announced Thursday night that it has suspended all of its operations, not just those in California, “while we take time to examine our processes, systems, and tools and reflect on how we can better operate in a way that will earn public trust.” Original article below.

The robotaxi company Cruise has been revving up for rapid growth. In August, California regulators granted carte blanche to the outfit in San Francisco, where its CEO has envisioned deploying 10 times more robotaxis than the several hundred it operated this summer. Meanwhile, Cruise, which is majority-owned by General Motors, announced expansions into a dozen other U.S. cities including Austin, Charlotte, Houston, Raleigh, and Washington.

California just forced Cruise to hit the brakes. On Tuesday, the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles suspended Cruise’s permits to deploy driverless vehicles statewide. The impact of that move will reverberate throughout the tech and car industries, and well beyond California.

In its press release , the California DMV cited “an unreasonable risk to public safety” posed by Cruise robotaxis. It is not hard to see how the DMV might arrive at that conclusion. For months, San Francisco police, fire, and transportation officials have drawn attention to a litany of incidents involving robotaxis from Cruise as well as its rival Waymo (a subsidiary of Alphabet, which also owns Google) involving blocked traffic, interrupted emergency responses, and hindered public transportation. In just the past few weeks, Cruise vehicles have collided with a fire truck , gotten stuck in wet concrete , and halted atop a pedestrian who had been struck by a hit-and-run driver. It is the last of those incidents—and Cruise’s alleged withholding of camera evidence showing that its car dragged the pedestrian for 20 feet— that apparently triggered the DMV’s suspension. As awful as that incident is, the DMV clearly had concerns about Cruise well before it occurred on Oct. 2; in August, the DMV cited safety issues when it forced the company to halve its autonomous fleet .

Amazingly, it was only two months ago that the California Public Utilities Commission ( one of whose members is a former Cruise executive) decided to allow Cruise and Waymo to operate as many robotaxis as they want throughout San Francisco—a decision that was vehemently opposed by city officials as well as angry residents who mounted a grassroots campaign to place traffic cones on robotaxis’ hoods, rendering them inoperable. California’s regulatory structure splits autonomous vehicle responsibilities between the DMV, which handles physical vehicles, and the CPUC, which regulates ride-hail operations. A year ago in Slate, I criticized that structure as unwieldy and sclerotic; the diametrically opposed robotaxi decisions of the CPUC and DMV now make it seem outright dysfunctional. California’s Legislature needs to step in and restructure the state’s self-driving oversight.

Beyond the Golden State, the suspension of Cruise’s permits raises questions about the safety of Cruise vehicles on public roads in Austin , where the company is now operating, as well as the cities, from Miami to Seattle, where it plans to expand. If Cruise’s technology is too dangerous to operate without a safety driver in San Francisco, why is it OK to subject those living in Nashville or Dallas to the risk?

For Cruise, the California DMV’s move is about the last thing the company needs right now. Beyond the freeze in Bay Area operations, the company’s planned launch in Los Angeles will have to be shelved, at least temporarily. Worse, the DMV’s citation of “unreasonable risk” to road users directly contradicts Cruise’s claims, championed frequently by CEO Kyle Vogt , that regulators must clear the way for robotaxis in order to address an ongoing American road safety crisis. Cruise even ran advertisements over the summer in newspapers, including the New York Times, headlined “Humans are terrible drivers,” offering its technology as the optimal solution. That argument was always silly ; there are far easier and more immediate ways to reduce crash deaths than by adopting robotaxis, such as installing automated traffic cameras and lowering speed limits. Although the California DMV’s move makes Cruise’s safety pitch seem even less credible, the company appears to be sticking with it. “Ultimately, we develop and deploy autonomous vehicles in an effort to save lives,” Cruise tweeted Tuesday while announcing the suspension of operations in San Francisco.

Tweaking its safety narrative may be the least of Cruise’s problems right now. A source who previously worked at Cruise shared with me the company’s internal 2023 objectives, including 2,300 robotaxis deployed and $120 million in revenue, mostly from the Bay Area. (Cruise did not respond to questions I asked about those figures while writing a previous article.) Those goals were already going to be a stretch (the company had around 300 autonomous vehicles deployed in California in August), but halting robotaxi operations in California makes them essentially impossible. Meanwhile, higher interest rates and an ongoing autoworkers strike are adding to the financial pressure of carmakers, including General Motors, Cruise’s patron. GM’s patience with Cruise’s problems could wear thin, perhaps to the point that it walks away entirely—as Ford and Volkswagen did with the autonomous-vehicle startup Argo.ai a year ago after providing over $1 billion in investment.

Waymo, the other robotaxi heavyweight, has been tied to fewer dangerous incidents than Cruise and has not received a similar smackdown from the California DMV. Still, a suspension of Cruise’s permits carries risks for that company as well, especially if it damages the popular perception of robotaxis writ large, as happened in 2018 after a prototype self-driving car from Uber struck and killed Elaine Herzberg in Tempe, Arizona.

Such fears are growing within the AV sector, where Cruise has developed a reputation for playing fast and loose with safeguards. In the hours after the DMV’s announcement, AV boosters were already moving to draw a bright line between Cruise and other AV players. Matt Wansley, a former executive of the AV company nuTonomy, told the New York Times , “Companies should be judged by their on-road safety performance, and there is a significant difference between Cruise and Waymo.” Alex Roy, an Argo.ai veteran, implied that Cruise was an outlier when he shared news of its suspension on LinkedIn: “Remember how I’ve been saying not all Autonomous Vehicle developers are the same? Here you go.”

But if Cruise does end up shining a harsh spotlight on the entire robotaxi industry, that would hardly be a bad thing. Although robotaxis’ supposed safety benefits remain speculative, their mission to make car use as easy as possible could catalyze driving, emissions, and sprawl—and cement the autocentricity of American cities. Indeed, Cruise may end up doing America a favor by bringing scrutiny to an emergent technology that badly needs it.

Self-driving car company Cruise pauses even more operations as it aims to rebuild trust

Cruise vehicles will no longer be on Austin streets – at least for now.

The California-based autonomous vehicle company is temporarily ramping down all operations of its vehicles on public roads, including vehicles that had human drivers supervising.

It marks the latest scale down for Cruise, which paused driverless operations in Austin and nationwide in late October.

The pauses came after one of the company’s vehicles was involved in a high-profile incident in early October where a Cruise vehicle hit and dragged a pedestrian in California. After that incident, Cruise has been working to “rebuild public trust."

The company, which announced the latest change in a blog post Tuesday, said it plans to operate its vehicles in closed-course training environments and simulation programs during the pause.

What have Cruise's operations looked like in Austin?

Cruise, which is a subsidiary of General Motors, has had an Austin presence since September 2022. In December 2022 it began offering driverless ride-hailing services in certain areas of downtown, Central and East Austin between 9 p.m. and 5 a.m. with plans to expand.

The company has been the subject of some viral videos in Austin in recent months showing vehicles in traffic jams and stopped in intersections, leading people, including City Council Member Zohaib “Zo” Qadri, to raise concerns about the company's operations in Austin.

What happened in October?

The California Department of Motor Vehicles suspended Cruise's testing and deployment permits in the state and accused the company of withholding information about a high-profile incident after the fatal crash, an accusation the company denied.

Cruise said the incident occurred when a car, driven by a human, collided with a pedestrian crossing a street against a red light. The pedestrian was then launched in front of an autonomous Cruise vehicle which braked but still collided with the pedestrian, and then pulled over after stopping, dragging the pedestrian forward about 20 feet.

Cruise has also been the subject of a federal probe from the National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration examining if the self-driving vehicles are using appropriate precautions around pedestrians.

What other actions is Cruise taking?

Last week, the company announced it was issuing a voluntary software recall of 950 vehicles designed to address what a Cruise vehicle does after a collision to address cases where the vehicle's software might cause the vehicle to pull over when that's not the desired response.

The company has also been cutting contract workers that supported the company’s ride-hailing services. The company did not say if Austin workers were affected or how many positions were cut.

Are there still self-driving vehicles in Austin?

Cruise vehicles are not the only autonomous vehicles that have been operating on Austin roads. Companies including Waymo and Volkswagen are currently testing such vehicles in Austin. Until autonomous vehicle startup Argo AI shut down last year, Ford and Argo AI were also testing self-driving vehicle technology in Austin including ride-hailing and delivery services.

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Where did Cruise robotaxis recently cause a traffic jam?

Answer: san francisco..

Sovremennik" cinema square, Elektrostal Live Cam

Sovremennik" cinema square, elektrostal.

Live webcam shows the square in front of the cinema «Sovremennik» in real time. The camera is installed on the house number 18 on Mir Street in the city of Elektrostal, Moscow Region, Russia. The live camera is aimed at the monument to I.F. Tevosyan, which is located on the square of the Sovremennik cinema. The intersection of Tevosyan Street and Mir Street is in the field of view of the web camera. Therefore, this live camera can help assess the workload of this section of the road and the presence of congestion at the intersection. The main entrance of the school №13 and the pedestrian crossing in front of it also on the broadcating.

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