California DMV Orders GM Cruise to Halve Robotaxis After Crashs and Traffic Jams

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The California Department of Motor Vehicles today requested that Cruise cut in half its fleet of driverless cars in San Francisco after a crash with an emergency vehicle and traffic jams.

GM Cruise will have no more than 50 driverless vehicles in operation during the day and 150 driverless vehicles in operation at night.

DMV warned that they reserve the right to suspend or revoke testing and/or deployment permits if there is a risk to public safety.

There were at least two incidents of vehicles hitting Cruise AV. On Thursday, Aug. 16, a fire engine slammed into a Cruise car that had stopped in the middle of an intersection on a green light, injuring its passenger. The fire truck had its lights and sirens on, said police officials. On the same night, a cruise vehicle and a car collided on Mission and 26th.

On Friday, Aug. 11, the day after the PUC vote, nearly a dozen Cruise cars stopped in the middle of a two block stretch in North Beach, causing backups in all directions.

On Thursday, Aug. 16, Mission Local filmed another Cruise vehicle that froze on Mission Street before turning into an active construction zone on the wrong side of the road.

Here isCruise statement on the emergency vehicle crash:

The AV positively identified the emergency vehicle almost immediately as it came into view, which is consistent with our underlying safety design and expectation. It is worth noting, however, that the confines of this specific intersection make visual identification more challenging – for humans and AVs alike – as it is significantly occluded by buildings, meaning that it is not possible to see objects around the corner until they are physically very close to the intersection.

The AV’s ability to successfully chart the emergency vehicle’s path was complicated by the fact that the emergency vehicle was in the oncoming lane of traffic, which it had moved into to bypass the red light.

Cruise AVs have the ability to detect emergency sirens, which increase their ability to operate safely around emergency vehicles and accompanying scenes. In this instance, the AV identified the siren as soon as it was distinguishable from the background noise.

The Cruise AV did identify the risk of a collision and initiated a braking maneuver, reducing its speed, but was ultimately unable to avoid the collision.

Traffic Jams by Cruise

Ten Cruise robotaxis stopped and caused traffic jams. Cruise said this was because of loss of cellular service. Cruise has indicated that they could make their own dedicated cell towers to avoid this kind of problem. This would be a few million dollars of infrastructure for each city they service.

3 thoughts on “California DMV Orders GM Cruise to Halve Robotaxis After Crashs and Traffic Jams”

  2. Tesla robotaxis could avoid all these problems even if they had similar software issues by having Starlink antennas as a backup if 4G/5G is lost and human backup drivers ready to take over remotely if there are problems the car can’t handle.

    A system to drive robo taxis remotely as needed seems important to a smooth transition.

    • Teslas even with a human driver often crash into fire trucks, the Cruise robotaxi ,did not crash into anything, a defective human crashed into the Cruise.
      Californians are known to reduce innovations such as Carbon free nuclear, and robotaxis at the behest of the richest, who can’t spell autonomy.

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