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Every new technology needs of a break-in and adjustment period to become part of our daily life without causing problems, ed that’s what’s happening with robot taxisor ride-hailing, by GM Cruise and the Alphabet company Waymo.
The service, which is extremely simple to use – in fact, you just need to access an application to request it and it is also active at night in some parts of the city of San Francisco – is enjoying much successbut overconfidence that passengers are showing towards self-driving software it is causing some disruption to the city of San Francisco.
Perhaps counter-intuitively, customers trust their self-driving car so much that they fall asleepending up activating the security procedure that it imposes on company personnel to immediately send a distress call in the event of no response from the passenger.
According to the offices of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, San Francisco County Transportation Authority and the Mayor’s Office on Disability, In December alone, Cruise personnel called 911 three times after that the passenger in one of their robot taxis hadn’t responded to the two-way voice linkinstalled in each car.
On each of the three occasions, the police and firefighters rushed to the scene, punctually finding the same scene: the passenger who had simply fallen asleep during the ride.
The letter signed by the three public offices and invited to the California Public Utilities Commission, puts the spotlight on how these reports, which turned out to be false alarms, have wasted public money and potentially stolen resources from people in real need: “Taxpayer-funded emergency response resources used for non-emergencies undermine their availability to members of the public in real need”.
Over the past week, some transportation officials in San Francisco and Los Angeles have joined their voices with those of the three public agencies signatories to the letter, demanding to curb calls by Cruise and Waymo to expand their paid robotaxis services in both cities.
Local authorities say they are concerned the technology is not yet ready for such widespread use and They are calling for private companies to be forced to share more data about their cars’ performance and meet specific benchmarks, before the service can be scaled up.
To arouse most concern about safety traffic are not so much false alarms, but the occasions when self-driving cars have made it difficult, if not actually impeded, for California firefighters to do their job.
According to reports from the Wired newspaper, in June 2022 one of the robots – taxis of the Cruise company hit a fire hose in use during firefighting operations.
A second incident last week saw firefighters fighting a major blaze in the Western Addition neighborhood witness a driverless vehicle approach.
Firefighters have “made efforts to prevent the Cruise AV from passing over their pipes and they were unable to stop it until they shattered a window of the Cruise AV”the San Francisco agencies denounced in their letter.
City Fire Department spokesman Jonathan Baxter confirmed both incidentsadding that the rescue operations have lost two minutes of time to stop the vehicle and about that the department is in contact with Cruise to get to the bottom of the two events.
Cruise company spokeswoman Hannah Lindow said the vehicle was involved in last week’s crash it was still when a firefighter broke the glass.
Lindow then added, in response to the call for more transparency, that aCertain data required by regulators must be kept private for customer safety and to protect “proprietary information”.
The spokeswoman then underlined how, since 2021, the company has “traveled millions of miles in a highly complex urban environment with zero injuries or fatalities”.
Regarding the San Francisco public administration’s allegations of wasted public money caused by Cruise’s hoaxes, Lindow replied: “While suggesting that Cruise shouldn’t err on the side of caution in ensuring unresponsive passengers are safe, that’s something we strongly disagree with.” .
The GM-owned company began testing self-driving cars in San Francisco in 2021 and launched a night-only robotic driving service in one part of the city last year.
Now he’s asking the state of California to approve an expansion that would allow its vehicles to pick up paying passengers on most of San Francisco’s streets. The company also wants increase its fleet from the current 30 vehicles to at least 100.
Waymo received the OK from California only last November but has been active since 2020 in Phoenix, where it has a fleet consisting of 7 vehicles.
In October, it announced it would begin testing its driverless cars also in Los Angeles with the aim of adding the city of angels to those where the service is active.
The relationship between the public administration and private robot-taxi service companies, however, also has another face: that of autonomous mobility guaranteed to disabled people.
The letters filed this week have not only reported accidents and defects of this new form of transport, but also highlighted its potential in making city streets safer and giving to those who cannot drive themselves the possibility of being equally autonomous and independent.
Transportation officials in Los Angeles and San Francisco, where driverless car rides are active, they are particularly interested in the possibility that robot-taxis join the offerreduced to the bone, of vehicles equipped to transport people in wheelchairs in their cities.
The answers from Waymo and Cruise were not long in coming.
Waymo has assured that it is working to develop an autonomous vehicle for wheelchair users and blind peoplewhile Cruise said he’s building a taxi tailored to this type of need, called Origin, which will debut this year.
The commendation from local agencies came with a caveat: cities also want to see travel data provided to users with disabilities.
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