Two autonomous Cruise vehicles and an empty San Francisco police vehicle were blocking the only exits from the scene, according to one of the reports, forcing the ambulance to wait while first responders attempted to manually move the Cruise vehicles or** locate an officer who could move the police car**.
So, in conjunction with a cop car, the road was blocked. I’d love to see an actual picture or diagram of the blockage.
These AVs are programmed to give high priority to police cars, ambulances, read works, and what not. They’re also happy to interprete what they see in the strictest way possible.
IIRC, there was a YouTube video of one of them going crazy because of a traffic cone… then running away from the operator when they tried to override and correct what it was doing.
It could be as little as cops leaving the car “somewhat” blocking the normal flow of traffic, then the Cruise cars strictly obeying “pull over and wait”, while someone with more common sense might’ve reversed, gone onto the curb, or whatever.
Then again:
Cruise spokesperson Tiffany Testo countered that one of the cars cleared the scene and that traffic to the right of it remained unblocked. “The ambulance behind the AV had a clear path to pass the AV as other vehicles, including another ambulance, proceeded to do,”
…it could’ve been the “blocked” ambulance’s drivers who were on autopilot?
Seems like not enough data to draw a conclusion.
Obviously it is a sad story for the deceased and it’s family but according to the cruise spoke person there was supposed to be enough space so the emergency car could pass. And later the article mentioned there were 55 more situations where these cars caused problems. Well there are car accidents everywhere in the word every day because of careless drivers so this is kinda common. So I really don’t think banning these cars should be an answer, but to keep improving them.
Maybe don’t allow autonomous cars on public streets then? The tech is nowhere near ready for prime time.
We should ban police cars too - because allegedly an empty police car was also blocking the ambulance.
The AV spokesperson said they reviewed the footage and found there was room to pass their vehicle safely and another ambulance and other cars did so.
I don’t get it, why isn’t there an option for a Cruise employee or a first responder to just take control of the thing when it gets stuck?
Drive to the right edge of the road and stop until the emergency vehicle(s) have passed
That is a direct quote from the California DMV and from the sounds of it that’s exactly what the autonomous car did.
The right answer, in my opinion, is to allow the first responders to take control of the car. This wasn’t just a lone ambulance that happened upon a stationary car. It was a major crash (where a human driven car ran over a pedestrian) with a road that was blocked by emergency vehicles. A whole bunch of cars, not just autonomous ones, were stopped in the middle of the road waiting for the emergency to be over so they could continue on their way. Not sure why only this one car is getting all the blame.
I just actually bothered to read the article, and it sounds like it was an empty police car blocking the way between two Cruise cars that had pulled over leaving a space, and there in fact was a way to manually move them but it took critical time.
These cars get stuck all the time and are a major local controversy, so I’m guessing this was the click-baitiest headline they could go with. “Police officer carelessly gets in the way of paramedics” just doesn’t have the same ring.
I believe from what I read is that some of these driverless car companies in the US are releasing their fleet, flooding the street 24/7. Some of them will take up parking places, cause traffic jam, or just stall in the middle of the road.
Maybe it’s different in the Europe, where there’s stricter regulation, since from the comments here, many who are okay with driverless car are mostly from European countries. Unless if you own stock in those companies, then there’s incentive caused bias.
Just like how drugs need to go on multiple clinical trials before going on the mass market, I believe that if you want driverless vehicles, a lot of testing is needed.
But this is not testing / gathering data phase, Cruise has 300 cars at night, 100 during the day in SF, while Waymo has around 250 cars. Again, this is not testing phase, there’s no driver to safeguard in case things go wrong, these are actual driverless taxi that charges people.
The main rationale of these companies is not to bring a safer environment with driverless cars, the main rationale is how to get rid of gig workers that causes problems to Uber or Lyft, problems such as demanding living wage, proper employment status, unions, etc.
If you want to look at a better approach, maybe look at how Singapore is doing it
- it’s operated by SMRT and SBS bus, which are regulated and owned by government
- it’s self driving bus
- “drivers will remain essential to the operation of autonomous vehicles even when these do take off, although their job scope will change”
So if you wanna support, maybe don’t support what Cruise is doing, but more of what Singapore is doing
- it’s still highly regulated
- it’s a bus, it’s a public transportation, so it still helps in tackling climate issues.
- it’s not being used to fire workers,
- there’s still failsafe, the drivers are standby, in case the bus goes haywire
