Driverless cars promise a future with less congestion and pollution, fewer accidents resulting from human error and better mobility for people with disabilities, supporters say.
But every now and then, one of the cars runs into trouble in a way that casts some doubt on that bold vision.
So it was on Tuesday in San Francisco, where a driverless car somehow drove into a city paving project and got stuck on wet pavement.
Paul Harvey, 74, a retired contractor who lives in the city’s Western Addition neighborhood, took a picture of the car with its roof-mounted sensors, tilted slightly forward, its front wheels resting on the new poured concrete.
“I thought it was funny,” Mr. Harvey said in an interview Wednesday. “I was happy because it showed how creepy and weird the whole thing was to me.”
The incident, before SFgate.com reportedcame just days after California regulators agreed to expand driverless taxi services in San Francisco, despite safety concerns from local officials and community activists.
In a 3-to-1 vote last week, the California Public Utilities Commission, which regulates self-driving cars in the state, gave Cruise and Waymo permission to offer paid rides at any time during the day, throughout the city.
Cruise, a subsidiary of General Motors, offers taxi service in one-third of the city while Waymo, owned by Google’s parent company, Alphabet, offers free rides in passenger
Tuesday’s accident involved a Cruise vehicle, according to city officials who said it was unclear how the vehicle ended up on the pavement.
Rachel Gordon, a spokeswoman for the San Francisco Department of Public Works, said the paving project on Golden Gate Avenue was marked with construction cones and had workers with flags at each end of the block.
“That part of the road needs to be repaved, at Cruise’s expense,” said Ms. Gordon. “Fortunately, no one was injured.”
said Ms. Gordon said city officials “expressed concerns” about vehicles, which drove into fire hoses or “just stopped in the middle of the road.” He said the city is willing to work with the companies but “there’s still a lot of work to be done, we believe.”
A Cruise spokesman, Drew Pusateri, confirmed that one of the company’s driverless vehicles “entered a construction area and came to rest on wet concrete.”
Mr. Pusateri said the company “recovered” the vehicle, although it was unclear whether it was able to drive off the cement or whether it had to be towed. He said the company is in contact with city officials about the incident.
Driverless cars have become a common sight in San Francisco, a tech hub where they are often seen on test drives, gathering data used to improve their autonomous technology.
Although driverless cars have not been blamed for any serious injuries or crashes in San Francisco, they have been involved in some shocking episodes.
On Friday night, as many as 10 Cruise driverless cars stopped working near a music festival on San Francisco’s North Beach, causing traffic to back up, according to The San Francisco Chronicle. Cruise said in a statement Thursday that it successfully transported thousands of concertgoers over the weekend but that “limited bandwidth issues” made it difficult for the company’s remote advisors to maneuver some of its vehicles through traffic. .
In January, a Cruise vehicle drove into an area where firefighters were working and did not stop until a firefighter began “slamming its hood and smashing the vehicle’s window,” according to city records. In May, Waymo’s driverless car blocked a fire vehicle as it backed into a station.
Driverless companies have fiercely defended their safety records, especially when compared to the tens of thousands of people who die in car crashes each year in the United States.
Referring to its autonomous vehicles, Cruise said in a statement in April, “Over the course of our first million driverless miles, our AVs have been involved in fewer collisions, have been major contributors to fewer collisions and have been involved in fewer severe collisions with a significant risk of injury than human drivers in a comparable driving environment.”
Paul Leonardi, a professor of technology management at the University of California, Santa Barbara, said it would be foolish to expect driverless cars to work perfectly. Cars, like any new technology that relies on machine learning, need to work in real-world conditions to improve.
“It needs to experience a diverse range of use cases in order for it to learn, and driving on wet concrete is one of those use cases,” Professor Leonardi said. “We can frame it as a positive that everything it did was stuck in concrete.”
He added that when driverless cars encounter conditions like cones and wet concrete, “they can learn from it and the machines can figure out what to do better next time.”
Yiwen Lu contributed reporting.