Setbacks for driverless taxis in San Francisco

SAN FRANCISCO: Driverless taxi operator Cruise has agreed to cut in half the number of vehicles it operates in San Francisco after one of them collided with a fire truck and another got stuck in wet concrete in August.

Cruise says it will now field a maximum of 50 self-driving taxis during the day and 150 at night after a request from the California Department of Motor Vehicles.

A passenger in the Cruise driverless car was slightly injured in the fire truck incident at a road intersection. Cruise said the robotaxi "immediately spotted" the fire truck, which had entered the field of vision of its on-board cameras only seconds after emerging from a bend in the road.

The robot car's software was unable to predict the likely path of the fire engine and a collision was unavoidable, said Cruise. Before the accident, Cruise driverless cars had safely encountered fire trucks on 168,000 occasions, the company said.

Earlier in August another Cruise vehicle got stuck in newly-poured concrete. San Francisco resident Paul Harvey told the local SFGATE website that he saw the car stuck at a construction site on Golden Gate Avenue. The car had no passengers inside.

"I can see five different scenarios where bad things happen and this is one of them," Harvey told SFGATE. "It thinks it's a road and it ain't because it ain't got a brain and it can't tell that it's freshly poured concrete."

The setbacks come only a week after the California Public Utilities Commission allowed the expansion of driverless taxi services from Cruise, owned by General Motors, and its rival Waymo, which is a unit of Google parent company Alphabet.

Cruise hit the headlines earlier in August when about 10 of its vehicles stopped working in the middle of a busy street in San Francisco’s North Beach neighbourhood. Cruise blamed a spike in mobile phone traffic caused by a local music festival for problems in guiding the cars.

The city's transport operators have been resisting a rapid expansion of robotaxi services for months. They argue that the technology is not yet reliable enough and pointed out, among other things, that the vehicles repeatedly block traffic and hold up ambulances.

Cruise and Waymo have been trialling their robot cars in San Francisco for at least a decade - initially with safety drivers on board, but now increasingly without a human at the wheel. They hope to switch to specially designed vehicles that have neither steering wheels nor pedals.