Less than a day after one of its driverless taxis crashed into a fire truck at a San Francisco intersection, Cruise agreed Friday to a request from state regulators to cut in half the number of vehicles it operates in the city.
The setback for the driverless car company comes just a week after the California Public Utilities Commission voted to allow the expansion of driverless taxi services from Cruise, owned by General Motors, and its rival Waymo, which is owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet. .
On Friday, the California Department of Motor Vehicles, which regulates the safety of driverless cars, asked Cruise to halve the number of cars it operates in San Francisco. The collision of the Cruise vehicle with a fire truck earlier in the day left a passenger in the driverless car injured. Earlier in the week, another Cruise vehicle was stuck in freshly poured concrete on another city street.
Cruise did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The company, which now has 400 vehicles operating in San Francisco, will have no more than 50 driverless vehicles operating during the day and 150 at night.
Last weekend, about 10 Cruise ships stopped working in the middle of a busy street in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood, blocking traffic for 15 minutes. Drew Pusateri, a spokesman for Cruise, said in a statement that the cars had difficulty connecting with Cruise employees who could have guided them along the way because of an increase in cellular traffic caused by a music festival in Golden Gate Park. of the city about four miles away.
Several other Cruise ships also stopped on the streets near the park.
A week ago, the CPUC allowed both companies to charge for rides around the clock anywhere in San Francisco. The CPUC and the DMV are the two agencies that govern autonomous vehicles in California. A company must obtain a permit from the DMV before it can apply for driverless deployment permits — the kind Cruise and Waymo received last week — from the utility commission.
The motor vehicle authority said in a statement that it was “recently investigating incidents involving Cruise vehicles in San Francisco.” The agency asked Cruise to reduce the number of vehicles operating in San Francisco “until the investigation is complete and Cruise has taken appropriate corrective actions to improve road safety.”
“The DMV reserves the right, following an investigation of the facts, to suspend or revoke the test and/or deployment permit if it is determined to be an unreasonable risk to public safety,” the agency said in its statement.
San Francisco officials have complained since January that autonomous vehicles are interfering with emergency vehicles. Before this week, officials had documented 55 incidents in which a driverless car stopped or interfered with emergency vehicles, including one instance with firefighters battling a house fire.
On Wednesday, city officials filed an injunction asking the CPUC to temporarily halt the expansion of driverless taxis. Neither company has detailed how they plan to add to their driverless taxi services.
