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Self-driving cars without safety drivers behind the wheel have flooded San Francisco streets. In August, General Motors-owned Cruise and Alphabet’s Waymo were granted permission to expand operations, allowing people to hail a driverless car like they do for an Uber. But the launch has been plagued by problems. CNBC’s Deirdre Bosa tested out both company’s robotaxis and spoke with city officials and Cruise CEO, Kyle Vogt, to see how the launch is going for the city and what’s next.

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SAN FRANCISCO

This California summer, passersby on the streets of San Francisco can be divided into two camps: Blase locals who are used to a parade of moving cars with no drivers or gobsmacked tourists fumbling for their smartphones to capture this long-promised vision of the future.

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The vehicles in San Francisco are operated by Waymo and General Motors owned Cruise and earlier this summer both operators received permission by a California regulator to operate 24/7 across the city except on freeways.

This made San Francisco the first major city with two fleets of driverless vehicles fully operating that the companies hope will drive their expansion elsewhere across the United States.

Accompanied by AFP, Isaac, a San Francisco resident and stay at home Dad, ordered his first ride on Cruise’s app.

“Percussion,” the vehicle’s name, arrived quickly. But instead of taking the direct route, which would have led to a supermarket in less than five minutes, the trip followed a long, unexplained detour.

“I’m actually impressed. It’s decent at braking. It’s not all psycho about slamming on the brakes and accelerating really quickly,” said Isaac.

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Isaac turned his attention to a quiz on the screen before him.

But he disagreed with the answer about the best burrito in San Francisco. “It’s a good driver but I’m not sure it has good taste in burritos.”

Twenty minutes and a dozen questions later, Percussion finally arrived at its destination, but parked quite far from the store, probably because of the roadworks.

Not that Isaac was discouraged: “It was awesome. I would do it again anytime.”

“It’s very peaceful. There’s no chatter. There’s not a weird radio station playing random music,” he observed.

And if it was the same price as an Uber “I would go for the robot because I’m kind of antisocial.”

Waymo tester Katherine Allen was also sensitive to the social aspect.

“The advantage that they have over human drivers is that they’re cautious, which can be really annoying to other drivers,” she said.

But “there’s not going to be any road rage” from a robotaxi, she added. 

Taking on her role as a tester, Allen gave the emergency “pull over” button a go and the vehicle veered safely to the side as intended.

Resuming the journey proved difficult. Human drivers showed no mercy for a robot wanting to get back in the driving lane.

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So far, most incidents have involved vehicles stopped on the road.

But local authorities have nevertheless asked Cruise to halve its fleet in San Francisco [to 50 cars active during the day and 150 at night], while it investigates two collisions that occurred last week, including one with a fire truck.

Even in this tech-crazed city, robotaxis are a divisive issue.

Environmental activists criticize them for perpetuating the reign of the private car, while associations for the disabled say they are not sufficiently adapted to their needs, and trade unions fear job losses.

But the excitement is there: Waymo says it has

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This California summer, passersby on the streets of San Francisco can be divided into two camps: blase locals who are used to a parade of moving cars with no drivers or gobsmacked tourists fumbling for their smartphones to capture this long-promised vision of the future.

Katherine Allen climbs into a white Jaguar, which then pushes out carefully into the traffic in a busy neighborhood crisscrossed by jaywalkers and cyclists.

The 37-year-old lawyer has been voluntarily testing Waymo’s robot cabs since the end of 2021. At first, there was always an employee of this subsidiary of Alphabet (Google’s parent company) on board, there to grab the wheel if needed.

And then one night with very little warning, the car came to her unchaperoned.

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“I was really nervous the first time, but not too nervous that I didn’t want to take it. I was excited too,” she said.

“For the first two thirds of the trip, maybe 20 minutes or so, I was freaking out and then all of a sudden it just sort of felt normal, which is weird, because it wasn’t normal!”

The vehicles in San Francisco are operated by Waymo and General Motors owned Cruise and earlier this summer both operators received permission by a California regulator to operate 24/7 across the city except on freeways.

This made San Francisco the first major city with two fleets of driverless vehicles fully operating that the companies hope will drive their expansion elsewhere across the United States.

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On Tuesday evening, accompanied by AFP, Isaac, a San Francisco resident and stay at home Dad, ordered his first ride on Cruise’s app.

“Percussion,” the vehicle’s name, arrived quickly. But instead of taking the direct route, which would have led to a supermarket in less than five minutes, the trip followed a long, unexplained detour.

“It’s odd to me that the steering wheel even turns… It’s kind of ghostly,” Isaac observed as the car pulled away embarking on the journey.

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“I’m actually impressed. It’s decent at braking. It’s not all psycho about slamming on the brakes and accelerating really quickly,” said Isaac.

Isaac turned his attention to a quiz on the screen before him.

But he disagreed with the answer about the best burrito in San Francisco. “It’s a good driver but I’m not sure it has good taste in burritos.”

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Twenty minutes and a dozen questions later, Percussion finally arrived at its destination, but parked quite far from the store, probably because of the roadworks.

Not that Isaac was discouraged: “It was awesome. I would do it again anytime.”

“It’s very peaceful. There’s no chatter. There’s not a weird radio station playing random music,” he observed.

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And if it was the same price as an Uber “I would go for the robot because I’m kind of antisocial.”

Waymo tester Katherine Allen was also sensitive to the social aspect.

“The advantage that they have over human drivers is that they’re cautious, which can be really annoying to other drivers,” she said.

But “there’s not going to be any road rage” from a robotaxi, she added as her car inched slowly through daytime traffic.

Taking on her role as a tester, Allen gave the emergency “pull over” button a go and the vehicle veered safely to the side as intended.

Resuming the journey proved difficult. Human drivers showed no mercy for a robot wanting to get back in the driving lane.

So far, most incidents have involved vehicles stopped on the road.

But local authorities have nevertheless asked Cruise to halve its fleet in San Francisco (to 50 cars active during the day and 150 at night), while it investigates two collisions that occurred last week, including one with a fire truck.

Even in this tech-crazed city, robotaxis are a divisive issue.

Environmental activists criticize them for perpetuating the reign of the private car, while associations for the disabled say they are not sufficiently adapted to their needs, and trade unions fear job losses.

But just as many see driverless cars as beneficial to these causes.

And the excitement is there: Waymo says it has more than 100,000 people on its waiting list.

Allen, who until now had enjoyed her rides for free, will have to pay in the future. Will she continue to use Waymo or go with a human driven Uber?

“It will depend on price and time… autonomous cars are almost always slower,” she said.

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A Cruise autonomous taxi in San Francisco.

New York
CNN
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San Francisco residents were caught off guard this weekend after Cruise self-driving cars caused a traffic jam, according to social media posts. The obstruction came a few days after California regulators approved robotaxi companies to operate their driverless cars 24/7 throughout the city.

Videos posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, show at least 10 Cruise vehicles not moving with their hazard lights blinking in the city’s North Beach neighborhood, near where the Outside Lands music festival was happening. One account, FriscoLive415, said the incident was a “complete meltdown.”

Witnesses told CNN affiliate KPIX-TV that the driverless cars were blocking intersections Friday evening for about 15 minutes, causing concern that driverless cars could impede emergency vehicles from accessing the area.

Cruise responded on X, writing that the music festival “posed wireless bandwidth constraints causing delayed connectivity to our vehicles.” The company added that it’s “actively investigating and working on solutions to prevent this from happening again.”

“We apologize to those who were impacted,” Cruise said.

Cruise didn’t immediately respond to a CNN request for comment.

The company recently posted on X that its vehicles had surpassed four million driverless miles, and the company is now exceeding one million driverless miles per month.

“They’re deploying hundreds of cars on our streets. They should take a timeout and a pause, until they perfect this technology,” Aaron Peskin, the President of San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors, told KPIX-TV. He represents North Beach on the board.

Peskin also told the Los Angeles Times that he’s concerned about an emergency if this happens again. “Our houses in North Beach are made of sticks,” he told the newspaper. He added that he’s pursuing “every means” to have the state’s decision reversed and might seek a court injunction.

The incident came a day after the the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), which regulates self-driving cars in the state, voted 3-to-1 in favor of Waymo and Cruise expanding their operations. That means residents and visitors to San Francisco will be able to pay a fare to ride in a driverless taxi, ushering in new automated competition to cab and ridehail drivers.

Cruise spokesperson Drew Pusateri previously told CNN that the 24/7 driverless service is a “historic industry milestone” that puts Cruise “in a position to compete with traditional ridehail, and challenge an unsafe, inaccessible transportation status quo.”

Despite the state’s approval, local officials also expressed their dissent.

The San Francisco Police Officers Association, San Francisco Deputy Sheriffs’ Association and the San Francisco Fire Fighters Local 798 all wrote letters to the CPUC expressing concerns that autonomous vehicles could impede emergency responders.

“The time that it takes for an officer or any other public safety employee to try and interact with an autonomous vehicle is frustrating in the best-case scenario, but when they can not comprehend our demands to move to the side of the roadway and are stopped in the middle of the roadway blocking emergency response units, then it rises to another level of danger,” wrote Tracy McCray, President of the San Francisco Police Officers Association, “and that is unacceptable.”

The San Francisco Fire Department has recorded 55 incidents of driverless vehicles interfering with their emergency responses in 2023 as of last week, the department confirmed to CNN.

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Self-driving cars once seemed like futuristic wonders, however, in tech-savvy San Francisco, autonomous vehicles are now just about everywhere, making deliveries and shuttling passengers.

Despite the city’s legacy of embracing new technology, San Francisco has become one of the fiercest battle grounds in the debate over autonomous vehicles, and whether they can safely coexist on streets already bustling with human drivers, cyclists, pedestrians, and other urban obstacles.

Across California, a total of 41 companies currently operate more than 2,000 autonomous vehicles in California. While most have test drivers inside, who are capable of overriding the cars when necessary, hundreds of vehicles on the road right now have no one behind the wheel.

As autonomous vehicle companies now seek to further expand their operations in the San Francisco, some say it’s time to hit the brakes on the emerging technology.

Questions, however, about safety and how exactly human drivers stack up against their A.I. counterparts don’t always have simple answers.

If you haven’t spotted one already, it’s only a matter of time. Driverless cars are here. Would you get into one? Many people want to hit the breaks on the technology. Senior Investigative Reporter Bigad Shaban explains what’s driving the controversy and what happened to him on a test run.

State transportation records, obtained by NBC Bay Area’s Investigative Unit and NBC News, reveal self-driving cars have been involved in hundreds of crashes across the state over the past five years. Most self-driving vehicles in California have test drivers traveling inside, who are able to override the cars’ computer systems.

According to records from the California DMV, those safety drivers had to override their vehicles thousands of times last year, including for safety reasons.

In another incident that snarled up rush hour traffic, a self-driving car shuttling Senior Investigative Reporter Bigad Shaban, swerved, then simply stopped on a major thoroughfare in the Outer Sunset neighborhood, blocking two lanes of traffic for 20 minutes.

Despite the technology’s current imperfections, industry insiders are quick to highlight the technology’s safety benefits, which they argue allow the vehicles to often outperform human drivers.

“Our cars don’t drive drunk, they don’t get distracted,” said Prashanthi Raman, Vice President of Global Government Affairs at Cruise, which is majority-owned by the automotive giant General Motors.

“In the vast majority of situations, the vehicle behaves exactly like it’s supposed to do, similar to a human driver,” Raman said.  “We’re really looking to improve interactions where that doesn’t work as appropriately as it should.”

Prashanthi Raman is the Vice President of Global Government Affairs at Cruise

Cruise and its major competitor, Waymo, owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet, are two of the largest driverless car companies in the United States.

Both companies are currently petitioning regulators with the California Public Utilities Commission to expand their robotaxi services in San Francisco, the state’s largest testing ground for autonomous vehicles, so passengers can request rides from their phones, 24 hours a day.

Waymo and Cruise already hold test permits from the California DMV that allow them to operate their vehicles at all hours of the day throughout San Francisco. However, both companies have their ultimate sights set on ride-sharing services, similar to Uber and Lyft, which requires the companies to secure separate permission from the California Public Utilities Commission. As of now, Cruise is only allowed to collect fares from passengers from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. in select parts of the city.  Waymo isn’t allowed to charge for its robotaxi services at all. On Thursday, however, the CPUC’s five commissioners will vote on whether to allow both companies to expand their ride-sharing services to all of San Francisco, regardless of the time of day.

It’s not always a smooth ride

Regulations in California require autonomous vehicle companies to self-report each collision involving an autonomous vehicle. Transportation documents, obtained by the NBC Bay Area Investigative Unit through a public records request, show autonomous cars have been in involved in at least 532 collisions since June 2018. However, in 252 of those crashes, the car was being fully controlled by the test driver, known in the industry as ‘conventional mode.’  The remaining 280 crashes occurred while the car was in full control, known as ‘autonomous mode,’ resulting in at least 64 injuries and a dead dog.

Of those crashes, 42 were truly driverless – with no safety driver inside the vehicle.

* An at-fault determination is typically made by law enforcement and insurance companies, according to the California DMV, which aimed to track at-fault data during the onset of the state’s testing program by collecting police reports and insurance-related information.  Law enforcement, however, does not always respond to the scene of an accident and so an at-fault determination isn’t always made.  As a result, the California DMV, says it has since stopped collecting such information and has not documented an at-fault determination since Nov. 25, 2019.

A California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) database, obtained by the Investigative Unit, details collisions with other vehicles, bicyclists, scooterists, skateboarders, and even city busses.

Self-driving cars were not always at fault in those crashes, according to the records. It’s unclear from the data, however, exactly how often other parties were to blame.

For autonomous vehicles in testing, with actual humans inside who can take the wheel, DMV records reveal the human drivers had to override their cars more than 8,000 times last year alone.

“If humans have to override these vehicles because of a safety issue, they’re not good to go,” said San Francisco Fire Chief Jeanine Nicholson, who said she opposes the expansion of driverless cars until the technology can be improved.

“I am not anti-technology. I am pro safety,” Nicholson said. “There’s a lot of smart people on both sides and they can troubleshoot and they can work together to figure things out and make things better, and I have seen no effort on the [autonomous vehicle] side to make that happen. And it’s really distressing.”

Nicholson says for months her department has asked Cruise to make its engineers available to meet with fire department staff to craft solutions to some of the technology’s shortcomings relating to emergency scenes.  Nicholson says those requests have so far gone nowhere.

Cruise, however, denies the accusation.

“We know that our relationship with city agencies and city departments are very important,” Raman said. “We continue to work with them and have met with them dozens of times over the last 18 months.”

While Nicholson acknowledges she and her staff have previously met with representatives from autonomous vehicle companies, those meetings have yet to yield any substantial solutions to the problems, she says, the fire department has repeatedly raised.

San Francisco Fire Chief Jeanine Nicholson

In San Francisco, cameras have captured self-driving cars getting confused by emergency scenes, sometimes plowing into caution tape, or blocking fire trucks.

Without a driver in the car, Nicholson said, it’s difficult to get the vehicles to move when they’re impeding first responders. The chief said her crews have even had to smash the window of a driverless car to stop it from getting in their way.

In instances where first responders need help moving an unresponsive driverless vehicle, fire department officials have been given a toll free phone number to call to reach a company representative.

“We don’t have time to call a 1-800 number when we are doing CPR on someone,” Nicholson said. 

Waymo never responded to NBC Bay Area’s interview request.

Raman, one of the leaders at Cruise, said the company’s fleet of vehicles are designed to come to a safe stop when they approach a situation they are unsure about.

“Traffic blockages are not something that we want to have happen, but it’s also one of the realities of living in a very dynamic street with pedestrians and bicyclists, with delivery trucks, with double parked vehicles,” she said. “So we are working to minimize when those things happen.”

Raman conceded the technology isn’t perfect, but said Cruise’s own analysis found the safety record of its self-driving cars often outperforms human drivers, who were responsible for more than 42,000 traffic related deaths in the United States last year, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).

Self-driving cars are only believed to have been involved in one fatal crash, which occurred in Phoenix back in 2018.

The comparison is a difficult one to make, however, since there are hundreds-of-millions more cars on the road being driven by humans, who log more than 3 trillion miles each year.

According to Cruise, its cars have driven more than 3 million miles, and haven’t been involved in a single death or life-threatening injury.

The one fatal crash involving a self-driving car

The accident involved an autonomous car from Uber, which has since halted its operation of self-driving vehicles.  The car, which had a test driver riding along behind the wheel, struck and killed a pedestrian who was jaywalking at about 10pm. In a 2019 report issued by the National Transportation Safety Board, investigators cited an “inadequate safety culture” at Uber, and noted “inadequate safety risk assessment procedures, ineffective oversight of vehicle operators, and [a] lack of adequate mechanisms for addressing operators’ automation complacency.” Other contributing factors, according to the NTSB, included drugs being found in the pedestrian’s system and the “failure of the vehicle operator to monitor the driving environment and the operation of the automated driving system because she was visually distracted throughout the trip by her personal cell phone.”

While injuries have so far been rare, traffic blockages are increasingly more common, something NBC Bay Area witnessed firsthand during one of two rides with Cruise’s autonomous vehicles.

The first test drive appeared to go smoothly, with the vehicle maintaining the speed limit and pausing for pediatricians in the cross walk. Senior Investigative Reporter Bigad Shaban hailed the ride through the company’s app and spent about 45 minutes in the vehicle, traveling from the Pacific Heights neighborhood to the Outer Sunset without any problems.

Soon after being dropped off, Shaban ordered a second ride, where he was accompanied by Eugenia Borges, a driving instructor of 15 years. Borges, who works for Ann’s Driving School in San Francisco, has instructed thousands of beginner drivers during her career and joined the NBC Bay Area Investigative Unit to assess the driverless ride.

Driving instructor Eugenia Borges and Senior Investigative Reporter Bigad Shaban take a test ride in a Cruise autonomous vehicle.

Less than one minute into the ride – and less than two blocks away from our pickup point – there were already signs of trouble.

Despite a green light, the car sat there for two minutes without budging.

“It’s very confused,” Borges said from the back seat. “Poor thing.”

The car eventually got through the intersection, but there were even more problems to come.

A construction sign up ahead indicated the far-right lane the vehicle was traveling in would be closed and was signaling vehicles to merge into the center lane. For more than three minutes, the car haltingly inched forward, but kept stopping, sometimes straddling the far-right and center lanes without moving.

“It’s a very safe situation for the car to turn and it’s just staying here,” Borges said. “I’m not sure why.”

Then, suddenly, the car accelerated and veered straight towards the median, stopping just short of hitting it.

“Oh, oh!” Borges exclaimed from the back seat. “This is not good.”

The car sat there occupying the far-left lane and part of the center lane without budging, as rush hour traffic backed up for blocks behind it.

NBC Bay Area’s second test ride with Cruise doesn’t go as planned.

Not even coaching from Borges could get the car moving again as onlookers stared and frustrated drivers honked their horns.

“Turn your wheel right!” she instructed.

After being stuck for twenty minutes, a Cruise employee arrived and drove the car away in manual mode.

The company declined an interview request to explain what happened, but sent a statement saying the issue stemmed from an “unexpected construction zone” that would have required several lane changes.

“The better course was for the [autonomous vehicle] to come to a safe stop rather than proceed,” the statement said.

Tweaking the technology to be able to handle every type of roadblock could take the industry years, according to experts, so gearing up driverless cars to navigate all across the country may still be a long road ahead.

“I’m rooting for this,” Borges said.  “I want this to happen, but with what I saw right now, it’s a big no for me.”

You can explore the entire California DMV database of autonomous vehicle collisions below.

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• San Francisco is the most recent city to approve driverless cabs. Waymo and Cruise operate in the area.
• On August 10, the city will vote on whether to allow the companies to expand their services.
• TikTokers are recording their experiences of riding in robotaxis to show viewers what it’s like.

Autonomous cars have come a long way since Google’s self-driving car project started back in 2009. 

Driverless taxis are now on the roads in Phoenix, Arizona, San Francisco, California, and Austin, Texas, but they still feel like a bizarre sci-fi concept to many.

On August 10, the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) will vote on whether to expand paid ride-hailing services for driverless cars in San Francisco, meaning they can operate much like typical ride-sharing apps, 24 hours a day for the general public.

Meanwhile, an increasing number of TikTokers have been documenting their experiences of using driverless taxis to get around — capturing the imagination of many viewers.

While most appear excited about the new technology, others are baffled by its futuristic nature, and skeptical about feeling safe.

This is what TikTokers have to say about their experience with the services.

Two elderly men called riding in a self-driving taxi the experience of a lifetime.

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One mega-viral TikTok video posted on March 3 received over 33.8 million views and featured two men who, according to the captions, were 81 years old and were surprised with a ride in a self-driving car after being told that they were waiting for an Uber. 

As the vehicle approached, the TikTok creator, Kenny, who goes by the username @patriotickenny, questioned whether it was a police car. Upon getting into the car and realizing there was no driver, both men appeared skeptical.

Kenny then asked the person filming, “Do you trust this?” 

As the car drove down the road, both men looked nervous and Kenny said he was scared, but when it managed to successfully navigate an intersection, he seemed impressed. 

“The car did a better job than if someone was driving,” Kenny said.

The other man said that the robotaxi was a “first-class driver.” 

“Riding in a self-driving car was an experience of a lifetime,” Kenny wrote in the video caption.

A YouTuber saw the benefits of a driverless taxi.

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Marina Mogilko, a YouTuber and co-founder of LinguaTrip, an online English learning platform, posted a TikTok video of herself ordering a driverless Waymo taxi in San Francisco on June 13.

“It looks like a normal car, except all the cameras inside and outside,” she said, gesturing toward the large spinning camera on the top of the white Jaguar. 

She told viewers that she couldn’t tell the difference in the driving quality between the self-driving car, and cars that were driven by humans. 

“Just imagine having a car like this for yourself, where you drive to work, you work in the backseat, and then it parks by itself, and maybe even works for you, driving other passengers while you are busy,” she said. 

At the end of her seven-minute trip, her bill was $7, she said, although she added that she didn’t actually have to pay the bill, because the company was still testing out the functionality of the cars.

“I can totally see how this is going to totally change the taxi business in maybe a couple of years,” she said.  

One creator said she has been taking driverless taxis since 2018, and feels more secure than in a regular cab, in some ways.

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Sophia Lovász, who goes by the TikTok username @sosobombs, has many videos documenting her self-driving taxi experiences on her TikTok account.

In a “driverless taxi vlog” posted on July 11, she showed viewers her entire journey in a driverless Waymo vehicle — which she nicknamed “Waymee” — in Tempe, Arizona, just outside Phoenix.

While the car was moving, she explained the rules: no smoking, no touching the wheel, and no sitting in the driver’s seat. 

“I personally like to use this service because I don’t have to worry about the driver being distracted, using its phone, having road rage, or having mood swings. And I don’t have to worry about the driver being like me and feeling sleepy, especially after work,” she said. 

Lovász also said that she has been using this service since 2018, and that she has “experienced the evolution of how much better it is at driving.”

Not everyone seemed to think their ride went flawlessly.

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In a TikTok video posted on June 17, user @rogerlbcn said that his Waymo driverless taxi got stuck in the middle of an intersection in San Francisco. 

The video showed that the car was stationary in the middle of an intersection, while other cars drove past it. 

After some time, the car moved forward slightly, and then stopped again. A notification popped up on the screen in the front of the car, which stated: “Our team is working to get you moving.”

After some time had passed, the car resumed driving. 

There have been previous reports of driverless cars blocking traffic over the years. In one instance, a light-rail train almost hit an autonomous car that stopped on its tracks.

Waymo did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment.

The response to the TikToks is mixed. lupengyu / Getty Images

Many of these TikToks have blown up, receiving many comments from viewers.

Some have welcomed the concept of being in a car with no driver, writing in comments sections that they thought they would feel safer in some ways to not have to be driven by a stranger.

But many viewers still seem skeptical about whether they’d trust a car that has no driver, expressing concern about the technology failing.

A 2022 survey found that three out of every four Americans feel less safe in a self-driving car, although people who work in the industry argue there’s potential for them to be safer than human drivers because the technology has a broader perception of data and doesn’t get tired.

Driverless taxis also introduce some ethical implications. Replacing humans with artificial intelligence has ethical implications. kodda / Getty Images

Some viewers have expressed concerns that many drivers will end up unemployed if this technology continues to develop, which could leave them without a source of income.

In July, Uber, Lyft, and taxi drivers united to protest against against the proposed Waymo and Cruise expansion, according to Mission Local, an  independent online news site covering the Mission District of San Francisco.

Soon, Cruise and Waymo could be allowed to operate 24/7 in San Francisco and charge for fully autonomous rides. Westend61 / Getty Images

Right now, Waymo and Cruise offer limited service in San Francisco. 

Cruise employees and “power users” — a group of public riders who provide regular feedback to Cruise — can get rides in almost all parts of the city at any time of the day.

However, the general public can only access the service between 10 p.m. and 5:30 a.m. the Northwest part of San Francisco, CNBC reported. 

Meanwhile, Waymo can currently only charge for its rides throughout San Francisco if a safety driver present. It can only offer fully autonomous services if the ride is free.

Cruise is waiting for permission to deploy its driverless vehicles 24/7 in the city, while Waymo is waiting for approval to begin charging for rides.

If the August 10 vote goes through, it will essentially allow the companies to operate in a similar way to Uber and Lyft. 

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Driverless cars — which are suddenly quite common in the Bay Area — have been touted as life-saving solutions by Cruise and Waymo, two local tech behemoths that are in an arms race for San Francisco’s roadways. But the “rigorous” training that these cars must undergo each day is still annoying — and endangering — San Franciscans who didn’t sign up to become the multibillion dollar companies’ unpaid lab rats.     

In June 2022, the California Public Utilities Commission authorized Cruise to deploy 30 autonomous vehicles — or AVs — for passenger use throughout designated regions of San Francisco, and said the company could charge for those rides. Five months later, the CPUC authorized Waymo to put its AVs on Bay Area streets as part of the state’s driverless pilot program. Optimistically described as a “milestone” by CPUC, the agreement gave Waymo the green light to autonomously drive passengers throughout San Francisco and stretches of Daly City, Los Altos, Los Altos Hills, Mountain View, Palo Alto and Sunnyvale for free test rides.  

A Waymo autonomous vehicle drives along California Street on April 11, 2022 in San Francisco, California.

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

On Dec. 12, 2022, Waymo applied for the CPUC permit that would allow the company to charge for driverless rides, filings show; four days later, Cruise applied to expand its fleet and deploy 100 self-driving cars across “the entire 7×7” of San Francisco. Both requests are still pending, and the next hearing is scheduled for June 29, TechCrunch reported.

The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency is still skeptical about Cruise and Waymo’s technological capabilities. The companies continue to wrestle for dominance, outpacing lesser known contenders like Pony.ai, Zoox and AutoX, but the city is wary of both Waymo and Cruise because they’ve obscured data about their cars’ basic operations.

There’s also the maelstrom of photos, videos and news reports showing the vehicles can cause major traffic snafus. Yet the expansions of Waymo and Cruise have marched on, with the CPUC seemingly poised to grant the permits the companies seek. Meanwhile, local transportation agencies have protested, arguing that the cars still endanger pedestrians, drivers and emergency personnel.

‘As if they were wrangling some cattle’

Just a few weeks ago, Anthony Russell witnessed a “whole spectacle” near 19th Street and Mission involving a stalled Waymo and a group of ranchers trying to unload a forklift. After Russell explained to the confused ranchers that they needed to get the driverless car behind them to back up, “they started whooping and waving at it as if they were wrangling some cattle,” he said. 

Last month, Michaela Foley, who lives near the city’s famous Painted Ladies, said she saw a group of exasperated construction workers try to usher a Cruise vehicle through a clogged intersection. “It was so goofy,” she told SFGATE, describing the cars as “incompetent ‘Futurama’-type robots.” 

A Waymo driverless taxi stops on a street in San Francisco for several minutes because the back door was not completely shut, while traffic backs up behind it, on Feb. 15, 2023.

Terry Chea/AP

According to Waymo, its AVs successfully maneuver around construction zones, emergency vehicles and double-parked cars on a regular basis. If the cars don’t quite know what to do, the company wrote, they’ll stop out of an abundance of caution.

But that means “they will stop traffic” and “stop moving if there is any sort of obstruction on the road,” former San Francisco resident Rachelle Green told SFGATE. Back in December, she said, she and other drivers were trapped by a Waymo SUV that couldn’t comprehend how to move past a double-parked produce truck. 

“It’s a little frustrating and just creepy to, you know, just see these cars with nobody in them,” said Debi Durst, a longtime Sunset District resident. Just two months ago, she saw one of them jerk to a halt near Herbert Hoover Middle School right as students were pouring out of class.

“It was quite the traffic jam, because the car was just stuck dead in the middle of this intersection right in front of the school,” Durst said. Shortly after, a man with a vest and some sort of tablet — presumably a company employee — showed up and desperately tried to untangle the mess. “He was just running around the car pressing all of these things on the tablet to get it to work, I guess, and nothing was happening,” she laughed. 

Two Waymo driverless taxis stop and face each other on a street in San Francisco before driving past each other, on Feb. 15, 2023.

Terry Chea/AP

Even though Durst helped beta test the technology for driverless cars and initially felt optimistic about them, now she says that seeing them all over the road is just “weird.”  

That’s one way to describe pilotless vehicles that are seemingly unable to consistently follow basic traffic laws or navigate San Francisco’s chaotic roadways. Even though Cruise brags that its cars have “state-of-the-art computer vision” that allows them to operate even “in the darkest of nights,” they’ve been stumped by simple intersections. Company reports show that the vast majority of their collisions took place after sundown.

Vincent Osorio, a project manager at Banana Republic, told SFGATE that he’s gotten stuck behind driverless AVs at least three times at night near Fell Street and Kezar Drive. “It couldn’t comprehend that turn into Fell,” he said. 

Surging 911 calls about ‘erratic,’ dangerous driving

The city’s transportation agency isn’t sold on AVs, either. 

In a 2021 letter endorsed by the SFMTA, representatives pointed out how a seemingly innocuous marketing reel from Cruise — which was supposed to illustrate the user benefits of driverless cars — backfired by showcasing how their vehicle, “Sourdough,” picked up and dropped off chief technology officer and co-founder Kyle Vogt by double-parking rather than pulling over to the curb. 

“Rather than demonstrating driving superior to human driving, the Cruise Videos elevate passenger convenience over the safety and convenience of all road users,” the letter reads. Another stylish marketing video released that year shows the car making the same decision multiple times. 

Waymo Taxi drives in “Bus Lane” in San Francisco Calif.

Joycelyn Perez/Courtesy of SFMTA

Waymo Taxi drives really close to SF Muni bus in San Francisco Calif.

Julia Friedlander/Courtesy of SFMTA

Joycelyn Perez/Julia Friedlander/Courtesy Of SFMTA
Joycelyn Perez/Julia Friedlander/Courtesy Of SFMTA

Similarly, “Waymo driverless AVs have committed numerous violations that would preclude any teenager from getting a California Driver’s License,” a May 31 comment from the SFMTA reads. 

Despite the companies’ repeated claims that driverless cars make roads safer, in the past 12 months, emergency personnel have received a surge of 911 calls from people who watched these “erratic” vehicles block lanes or completely stop in the middle of the road, SFMTA said in a January letter to the CPUC.  

According to the SFMTA, often, the cars would signal one way then abruptly go the other, or stall out and force other drivers to move around them by veering onto the sidewalk. Waymo traffic incidents skyrocketed to about 30 per month in March and April, according to the SFMTA comment from May. 

Map depicting autonomous taxi incidents in San Francisco Calif.

Joycelyn Perez/Courtesy of SFMTA

“In the short term, we need AVs to demonstrate that they can operate on our streets without creating new hazards,” Stephen Chun, a spokesperson for the SFMTA, told SFGATE in a written statement. “If they want us to believe things are getting better, they should give us data to demonstrate that, because that is not what we are seeing from calls to 911 and reports from SF Fire Department and Muni personnel.” 

The SFMTA wrote in its January letter that there were 92 reported incidents involving Cruise vehicles from May 29, 2022, through Dec. 31, 2022. Frustratingly, 88% of them took place on busy corridors where Muni lines, buses and street cars carry thousands of passengers each day. Even if an AV stalls for just a few minutes in one of those areas, Chun explained, it can disrupt service up to 2.5 hours. He also said that the SFMTA received three times as many calls and complaints in March and April compared to December of last year.

Additionally, there have been multiple instances where Cruise and Waymo AVs have encroached on local firefighters. 

In a slew of incident reports first published by Mission Local, San Francisco Fire Department personnel describe how they’ve resorted to “poking,” “prodding” and “pounding” on AVs that drove right into the middle of potential “life and death” situations. 

Last April, a Cruise car stopped right next to a Recology truck, blocking firefighters who were rushing down 17th Street to put out a blaze. “Engine 12 was dead in the water until the Recology driver came running and moved the garbage truck,” the fire department wrote. 

Then, in January, SFFD described how one AV accelerated toward a fire on Hayes Street and nearly ran over firefighters’ hoses, a stunt which could have seriously injured them. In the redacted report, the firefighter said they “yelled at” the car to halt and banged their fist on the hood. After “warning” it twice, they finally “smashed the window and the vehicle stopped.”  

A Waymo vehicle stops in front of fire truck in San Francisco, Calif.

Joycelyn Perez/Courtesy of SFMTA

After the bomb cyclone that tore through the Bay Area in March, one eerie report details how a Waymo vehicle driving north on Missouri Street sped toward firefighting personnel clearing a downed tree. When a firefighter flashed a box light into the driver’s seat to make it slow down, it became clear there was no one at the wheel. Then, another car — also driverless — raced toward them before abruptly grinding to a halt. Both stopped just a few feet away from the fire engine. The firefighter wrote that had they been clearing the branches in the dark, they were skeptical the cars would have spared the first responders on scene.  

In response to an SFGATE request for comment about safety procedures, a Cruise spokesperson wrote, “We are proud of our publicly reported safety record which includes driving millions of miles in an extremely complex urban environment. Interacting properly with emergency personnel is important to us, which is why we maintain an open line of communication with first responders to receive feedback and discuss specific incidents to improve our response.” 

Cruise released a list of resources specifically for emergency personnel in February. A Cruise spokesperson said that out of the 2 million miles its AVs have driven, none have caused serious injuries or fatalities. Waymo asserted the same, and said that the public’s lack of trust in the technology is due to their own unfamiliarity with the company and its safety track record.  

‘The Waymo Driver is in control at all times’

Riding in an autonomous vehicle feels a lot like being at the mercy of a 16-year-old student driver, but without the reassurance of an adult in the passenger seat. 

This comparison is what I furiously scribbled down in my notes during a recent test drive in a Waymo vehicle. The route was fairly simple: I was picked up near 24th Street BART and delivered to the notorious Safeway in the Castro. As my invisible pilot drove through the Mission’s cluttered roadways, it did exactly what it was supposed to do. It gingerly swerved through messy intersections. It yielded to the mail carrier who frantically jaywalked across Folsom. It ordered me to keep my hands off the wheel, assuring me that “the Waymo Driver is in control at all times.” But then the car did something I didn’t expect: It slowly started to veer toward oncoming traffic.  

Waymo Taxi blocks traffic in San Francisco Calif.

Joycelyn Perez/Courtesy of SFMTA

Unsure if it would correct itself, I did what anyone in this situation would probably do: I yelled out loud, like an idiot, to no one in particular. Seconds later, the car readjusted, and we were again on our merry way to the grocery store. After the car dropped me off, I watched it leave the Safeway parking lot and disappear into traffic like some sort of urban specter — one that I and many other people will likely see on the road again. 

Technically, this ride was perfect. But I, along with city representatives, am still unconvinced. 

Regardless, it seems that the CPUC is poised to grant these driverless car companies full, unfettered access to San Francisco’s streets in the near future. As Waymo continues to argue that the best way to build trust is by riding in its cars, what the company doesn’t explicitly tell you is that you are part of its learning curve. For now, city representatives have no choice but to watch and wait. 

“Regulators need to know about the failures and problems,” Chun said. “Not just the benefits that we all hope for.”  

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The bus was stuck. San Francisco’s eastbound 54 Felton line was heading up a narrow residential street when a white SUV coming the other way stopped in the middle of the road. It was a rainy Sunday evening last month, and the bus driver leaned up to the windshield and peered through the haze at the SUV’s pulsing hazard lights before slumping back and exclaiming in surprise, “What the hell? No driver of the car?!”

The 54, brought to a halt by an autonomous vehicle belonging to Alphabet’s Waymo, isn’t the only bus that’s run into trouble with San Francisco’s growing crowd of driverless vehicles. Bus and train surveillance videos obtained by WIRED through public records requests show a litany of incidents since September in which anxiety and confusion stirred up by driverless cars has spilled onto the streets of the US city that has become the epicenter for testing them.

Courtesy of SFMTA

A San Francisco public transit bus encounters a Waymo autonomous vehicle in its path on March 5.

As the incidents stack up, the companies behind the autonomous vehicles, such as Waymo and General Motors’ Cruise, want to add more robotaxis to San Francisco’s streets, cover more territory, and run at all hours. Waymo and Cruise say they learn from every incident. Each has logged over 1 million driverless miles and say their cars are safe enough to keep powering forward. But expansions are subject to approval from California state regulators, which have been pressed by San Francisco officials for years to restrict autonomous vehicles until issues subside.

Driverless cars have completed thousands of journeys in San Francisco—taking people to work, to school, and to and from dates. They have also proven to be a glitchy nuisance, snarling traffic and creeping into hazardous terrain such as construction zones and downed power lines. Autonomous cars in San Francisco made 92 unplanned stops between May and December 2022—88 percent of them on streets with transit service, according to city transportation authorities, who collected the data from social media reports, 911 calls, and other sources, because companies aren’t required to report all the breakdowns.

“We’re seeing a significant uptick in chaos on our streets.”

Jeffrey Tumlin, director of transportation, San Francisco

The records obtained by WIRED are more focused. They follow a previously unreported directive to staff of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency handed down last October to improve record keeping of incidents involving autonomous vehicles. Muni, as the agency is known, standardized the term “driverless car” when staff report “near-misses, collisions or other incidents resulting in transit delay,” according to the directive. Agency logs show 12 “driverless” reports from September 2022 through March 8, 2023, though Muni video was provided for only eight of these cases. Overall, the incidents resulted in at least 83 minutes of direct delays for Muni riders, records show. 

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That data likely doesn’t reflect the true scale of the problem. Muni staff don’t follow every directive to the letter, and a single delay can slow other lines, worsening the blow. Buses and trains cannot weave around blockages as easily as pedestrians, other motorists, and cyclists, saddling transit-dependent travelers with some of the biggest headaches caused by errant driverless cars, according to transit advocates.

San Francisco officials say they want to be supportive of new technology, but they first want to be shown progress on addressing failures—like random stops in front of buses and trains. “What we’re seeing is a significant uptick in traffic and other kinds of chaos on our streets,” says Jeffrey Tumlin, Muni’s director of transportation. “We are very concerned that if autonomous vehicles are allowed limitless, driverless operations in San Francisco that the traffic impacts grow exponentially.”

“This one not smart yet. Not good.”

A bus driver comments on a self-driving car blocking the route.

For Muni’s 54 bus, which traverses San Francisco’s southern edge, the vehicle blocking its way early last month was a driverless Waymo that got stranded between rows of parked cars. A human driver would have reversed, clearing space for the bus, which isn’t allowed to back up without a supervisor. Instead, the Waymo Driver, as the company calls its technology, alerted a remote “fleet response specialist” to help. Waymo spokesperson Sandy Karp says that this worker provided guidance to the car that “was not ideal under the circumstances” and made it challenging to resume driving. 

That left the Muni driver in a bind. “I can’t move the bus,” the driver said to one of two riders on board. “The car is automatic driving.” The driver radioed managers and doffed their cap: “Whoosh … Half hour, one hour. I don’t know. Nothing to do.” Thirty-eight stops and about five miles remained ahead for the 54. The driver, looking out at the Waymo, expressed disappointment: “This one not smart yet. Not smart. Not good.”  

Courtesy of SFMTA

A San Francisco bus driver gestures at passengers in apparent confusion after a Waymo driverless stopped in the middle of the road, blocking the bus.

Waymo’s Karp says one of the company’s roadside assistance crews arrived within 11 minutes of being dispatched to drive the SUV, clearing the blockage about 15 minutes after it began. Karp declined to elaborate on why the remote responder’s guidance failed but said engineers have since introduced an unspecified change that allows addressing “these rare situations faster and with more flexibility.”

The Transport Workers Union, which represents Muni train and bus drivers, deferred comment for this story to Muni. The agency declined to make drivers described in this story available for comment. But Tumlin, the Muni director, says San Francisco’s transit workers are frustrated. “When you encounter a vehicle with no human on board, it is dispiriting and disempowering,” he says. “There’s no one there to communicate with at all.”

Muni drivers can honk at other hindrances, including Uber, Lyft, and delivery drivers, and reliably expect that they will move. But driverless cars, while they can hear sounds, leave everyone guessing as to when they will give way. Tumlin wants companies operating driverless vehicles to prioritize responding to problems along key transit routes and worries that crews will struggle to keep up if fleets expand. There’s a lot at stake. Delays affect perceptions of reliability for public transit, driving away riders with other options. That could worsen transit funding shortfalls caused by soaring inflation and declining usage since the start of the pandemic. Similar driverless services are also being tested in other major US transit cities, including Austin, Los Angeles, and New York.

Even seemingly small incidents can have outsize impacts. On September 30, 2022, a Muni light-rail train, or streetcar, that was full of celebrating baseball fans began driving from a station into an intersection. An empty Cruise robotaxi at a stop sign to the train’s left then also drove forward, video shows. 

Courtesy of SFMTA

A San Francisco light-rail train nearly collides with a Cruise autonomous vehicle in footage from cameras on the train’s front and the side, and in the driver’s cabin.

Five seconds later, brakes slammed on both vehicles. Cruise spokesperson Hannah Lindow says the Cruise came to a complete stop first, averting a near collision. The sudden stop by the train, which was traveling at 7 mph, alarmed some of its 50-or-so riders, a number of whom shouted “whoa!” in unison. 

Courtesy of SFMTA

Passengers on a San Francisco light-rail train were jolted when it braked to avoid a near collission with a Cruise autonomous vehicle.

The driver danced in relief, swaying their arms and letting off a big breath, “Wooo,” before radioing in that “it came close, but no contact.”

Cruise employees arrived within one minute, Lindow says, and there were no injuries or damage, nor would there likely have been in a collision because of the slow speeds involved, according to Carl Berkowitz, a transit accident reconstruction expert who reviewed the footage for WIRED.  

At least a dozen pedestrians and passengers took to the intersection to snap images of Cruise’s Chevy Bolt, which was blocking the front side of the train car. One transit rider flipped a middle finger at the Bolt and dropped their face mask to yell something in its direction before storming off. Inside the train, one passenger asked, “Why are we still at this spot? Why are we not moving?” 

Courtesy of SFMTA

A train passenger shows a middle finger to a Cruise autonomous vehicle after it almost collided with a light-rail train.

The ordeal wouldn’t be over for the light-rail train driver until much later. “That’s what pisses me off,” the driver told a rider, referring to having to file a report at the end of their shift about the incident. “Now I’ve got to take an hour and write this crap up even though I didn’t hit. He hit me. It’s one of those cars that drive itself.”

It was seven minutes before the driverless car cleared the track and the train started again, drawing cheers from riders. The train driver was apparently left shaken. Nine minutes after the service resumed, they can be heard repeatedly whispering, “That was close.” Drivers are held responsible if any decision they made contributed to a collision, putting stress on them to be perfect.  

Though drivers were not made available for interview, Tumlin says that at least one, known as “Mack” on Twitter, has not held back on expressing their concerns. Last month, Mack commented about a Muni bus that had just been rear-ended hard enough by a Cruise driverless car to crumple its hood, an incident from which no injuries were reported. “When an autonomous vehicle causes a collision, it wasn’t tired, or intoxicated, it didn’t get distracted or try to get away with something it knew better than to do,” Mack tweeted. “It ‘believed’ it was driving correctly. They don’t work as advertised, and they shouldn’t be on the road.”

Cruise said in a blog post on April 7 that the bus’s movements had not been unusual but that its vehicle braked too late due to an “error related to predicting the movement of articulated vehicles.” The company says a software update rolled out across its fleet fixed the issue.

Mack was not involved in that Cruise incident, but on one trip in December that he tweeted about he slowed his bus to 5 mph from 19 mph when a Waymo at a stop sign took a left turn in front of him, according to the Muni footage obtained by WIRED. The Waymo “pulled out inappropriately,” Mack radioed managers while stopped to report the incident. “It was definitely a hazardous condition.”

Courtesy of SFMTA

A bus slows after a Waymo autnomous vehicle pulls out to take a left turn in front of the oncoming transit vehicle.

Waymo spokesperson Karp says the company’s driverless vehicle spotted the bus over 300 feet away and completed the turn 78 feet ahead of the bus. The company confirmed in a virtual simulation after the fact, Karp says, that “regardless of whether the bus slowed down or continued at its original speed, there was enough clearance for the Waymo Driver to execute its turn safely.” A bus driver, however, has to react within a split second using their own judgment of an incident’s potential outcomes.

Other incidents captured on closed-circuit television are less disputable. On January 22, a Cruise at a green light wouldn’t budge, preventing a San Francisco light-rail train from moving for nearly 16 minutes. As the train driver headed out to investigate, a passenger said, “Nobody in there, huh?” Over a span of 10 minutes, the driver chatted with passengers, checked with managers over the radio, and walked around the motionless Cruise vehicle. Someone wearing a reflective vest and holding a tablet eventually got into the Cruise and drove it away.

Cruise spokesperson Lindow says its self-driving system was designed to be conservative and come to what it deems a safe stop when the technology “isn’t extremely confident in how to proceed.” The company aims to have staff on scene within 15 minutes in such incidents and alerts San Francisco’s Department of Emergency Management when traffic is significantly affected. “Ensuring our vehicles are operating safely with as minimal impact to public transit and city services as possible has been a point of emphasis,” she says.

On January 21, a Muni bus with a couple of riders aboard had lost six minutes because a Cruise was lingering across an intersection crowded by police and fire vehicles, video shows. While other cars maneuvered past, the Cruise did not. “I have one of those autonomous cars in front of me, so I’m stuck,” the driver radioed. “I could make this turn on Sixth Avenue if this car wasn’t in front of me.” The bus was finally able to pass after the Cruise moved slightly. 

Courtesy of SFMTA

A bus gets stuck behind a Cruise autonomous vehicle near an emergency scene in San Francisco.

Footage obtained by WIRED also shows passengers unnerved by delays caused by the driverless cars. In December, a Cruise paused beside a temporary stop sign and blocked a bus for over three minutes before inching away. A Muni passenger, who apparently did not notice the robot vehicle, feared that the bus was experiencing mechanical problems. “Something must be wrong with the bus,” the rider can be heard saying while wearing headphones. “I hope this bus is OK. I am not about to get off. It’s too cold to be standing around.” 

Courtesy of SFMTA

A San Francisco bus driver uses a smartphone to capture the scene after a Cruise autonomous vehicle blocks the route.

In November, one light-rail passenger called it quits after waiting nearly six minutes for a Cruise driverless car in front to move. “There’s nobody in the car,” the driver told the person as they stepped off the train. Another passenger was more forgiving. “It’s not you,” that rider told the driver. 

Courtesy of SFMTA

A Cruise autonomous vehicle stops on the tracks as a San Francisco light-rail train approaches.

Cruise’s Lindow apologized for inconveniences to transit riders. Autonomous vehicles “are still novel, and certain behavior understandably attracts a lot of attention, but we’re proud of our safety record and remain committed to doing everything possible to make roads safer,” she says. 

As driverless cars keep racking up the miles, San Francisco transit advocates propose a variety of measures to lessen their impact. Jaime Viloria of Equity on Public Transit, a grassroots group of riders in the Tenderloin neighborhood, says companies operating autonomous vehicles should be fined for causing delays. “They need to learn from their mistakes,” he says. Bob Feinbaum, president of Save Muni, a small group of riders that meets monthly to discuss the agency, suggests letting authorities enter a code to move driverless cars to the side. “It’s crazy that these vehicles can stop in the middle of the road and police can show up and have no way of dealing with it,” he says. 

Giving transit more priority on the roads of San Francisco and across the US—for example by creating more transit-only lanes—would also help. “We don’t need to blame the new guy entirely for a problem that was really created by our fixation and focus on cars for so long,” says Richard Marcantonio, managing attorney for Public Advocates, a group that sues for transit improvements. 

The issues and delays caused by robotaxis plaguing San Francisco do not seem to be abating, and the thirst for more data and understanding about the emerging technology is growing. Tumlin hopes driverless car companies work with the city to set performance goals, on which expansions would be contingent. “If we don’t help industry do a better job of performing on urban streets,” he says, “public opinion will rapidly turn against this very important technology.”

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SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Today, Faction Technology, Inc., a driverless-technology company offering solutions that solve inefficiencies in micro-logistics and vehicles on demand, announced it is bringing driverless delivery to portions of the San Francisco Bay Area. Faction’s first partner is Cocola Bakery, which is using Faction to reliably deliver to its customers around the metro region. Deliveries will be made in lightweight, electric vehicles based on three wheel EV platforms from Arcimoto, Inc. (NASDAQ: FUV) and from ElectraMeccanica (NASDAQ: SOLO). Since July, Faction has made regular deliveries to the bakery’s customers and it’s now looking to add additional delivery partners in the coming months.

Equipped with Faction’s DriveLink® and TeleAssist® technologies, the company’s vehicle combines fleet autonomy with remote human teleoperation to carry out its deliveries. These technologies allow faction to provide businesses like Cocola Bakery with a delivery service that seamlessly delivers goods via a driverless fleet in an affordable, safe, and predictable way.

“Cocola Bakery and our customers have been ecstatic with the services Faction has provided us so far,” said Amir Aliabadi, CEO of Cocola Bakery. “We are now able to quickly, affordably, and reliably deliver our products to customers around the Bay Area, something we couldn’t easily accomplish before due to inconsistent gig-worker services.”

Through this initial launch, Faction continues to develop the technology powering its remote and driverless delivery solutions. New customer routes are first qualified with vehicles using safety drivers, in addition to being supervised by TeleAssist operators. System performance and road data are collected during every delivery to aid faction in consistently improving its technology and further expanding its services for Cocola Bakery and future customers.

“Our partnership with Cocola is just the beginning of what we have planned for Faction,” said Faction CEO, Ain McKendrick. “We’re achieving our cost and delivery targets while securing the data necessary to bring Faction and our technology to more partners in the coming year. The next phase is to make our services available to additional commercial customers in the Bay Area – restaurant chains, hardware stores, auto parts stores, and others – to maximize the use of our operating fleet while streamlining delivery in an affordable, reliable, and seamless way way.”

Faction is expanding its delivery services within the San Francisco Bay Area, and is currently opening up driverless delivery for other partners starting at under $2 per mile. Businesses interested in Faction and what its technology can do for them should contact Faction with the information below.

For more information on Faction and Cocola Bakery, visit www.faction.us or www.cocolabakery.com.

About faction

Faction Technology, Inc. is a Silicon Valley startup that develops driverless solutions based on light electric vehicles. Founded in February 2020, Faction is on a mission to revolutionize micro-logistics and vehicles-on-demand. The company believes the future of sustainable transportation is to develop driverless vehicles that are safe, cost-effective, and right-sized to serve a range of use cases for both business and passenger transportation needs. Faction currently powers driverless delivery in parts of the San Francisco Bay Area, and will expand into other metro regions in 2023. Faction also partnered with GoCar Tours, Inc., to facilitate driverless delivery of GoCar EV Sport Tour vehicles from GoCar’s depots to select pickup counters at partner locations in cities including Las Vegas, Monterey, San Francisco, and San Diego. For more information visit www.faction.us.

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Bloomberg/Contributor via Getty

Moveable explores the future of transportation, infrastructure, energy, and cities.

For the last five years, driverless car companies have been testing their vehicles on public roads. These vehicles constantly roam neighborhoods while loading with a variety of sensors including video cameras capturing everything going on around them in order to operate safely and analyze instances where they don’t.

While the companies themselves, such as Alphabet’s Waymo and General Motors’ Cruise, tout the potential transportation benefits their services may offer one day, they don’t publicize another use case, one that is far less hypothetical: Mobile surveillance cameras for police departments.

“Autonomous vehicles are recording their surroundings continuously and have the potential to help with investigative leads,” says a San Francisco Police department training document obtained by Motherboard via a public records request. “Investigations has already done this several times.”

The document released to Motherboard is a three-page guide for how officers should interact with autonomous vehicles (AVs), especially ones that have no human driver inside. It outlines basic procedures such as how to interact with the vehicles (”Do not open the vehicle for non-emergency issues” and ”Do not pull vehicles over unless a legitimate law enforcement action exists”) as well as whether to issue a citation for a moving violation for a car with no human driver (“No citation can be issued at this time if the vehicle has no one in the driver’s seat” but an incident report should be written instead). And the section titled “Investigations” has two bullet points advising officers of their usefulness in collecting footage.

Privacy advocates say the revelation that police are actively using AV footage is cause for alarm.

“This is very concerning,” Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) senior staff attorney Adam Schwartz told Motherboard. He said cars in general are troves of personal consumer data, but autonomous vehicles will have even more of that data from capturing the details of the world around them. “So when we see any police department identify AVs as a new source of evidence, that’s very concerning.”

“​​As companies continue to make public roadways their grounds testing for these vehicles, everyone should understand them for what they are—rolling surveillance devices that expand existing widespread spying technologies,” said Chris Gilliard, Visiting Research Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School Shorenstein Center . “Law enforcement agencies already have access to automated license plate readers, geofence warrants, ring doorbell footage, as well as the ability to purchase location data. This practice will extend the reach of an already pervasive web of surveillance.”

Waymo and Cruise are the two AV companies mentioned in the training document, although more have permits to test driverless cars in California (the state grants permission through the DMV, not the city). A Waymo spokesperson told Motherboard the company “requires law enforcement agencies who seek information and data from Waymo to follow valid legal processes in making such requests (eg secure and present a valid warrant, etc.). Our policy is to challenge, limit or reject requests that do not have a valid legal basis or are overly broad.” The company spokesperson also says they do not collect data “to identify individuals.” A Cruise spokesperson told Motherboard, “We are working closely with law enforcement on our common goal of making our roads safer. We share footage and other information when we are served with a valid warrant or subpoena, and we may voluntarily share information if public safety is at risk. Cruise has always worked closely with the communities we serve to make transportation safer, cleaner, and more accessible and will continue to do so.”

SFPD’s use of AVs as mobile surveillance cameras follows the practices of the Chandler Police Department in Arizona, where Waymo has been testing AVs since 2017. But previous reports indicated these were rare instances involving traffic crimes like hit and runs. SPFD did not respond to a Motherboard email asking for more details on when and how often it sought footage from AVs.

The use of AVs as an investigative tool echoes how Ring, a doorbell and home security company owned by Amazon, became a key partner with law enforcement around the country by turning individual consumer products into a network of cameras with comprehensive coverage of American neighborhoods easily accessible to police. Police departments around the country use automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) to track the movements of vehicles. The EFF has sued the SFPD for accessing business improvement district live cameras to spy on protestors.

Privacy advocates and researchers have long warned about the implications of increasingly sophisticated cars, but many of these warnings are essentially extensions of the privacy concerns of smartphones, where consumer technology tracks your movements and behavior, anonymizes it, and sells it to third parties in a manner that can be reverse engineered to identify individuals. They rarely imagine a scenario where cars on the road are constantly recording the world around them for later use by police departments.

It is the combination of using fixed location camera networks with rolling networks of autonomous vehicle cameras and data that scares privacy advocates most. “​​The holistic outcome of these combined moving and fixed networks is a threat that is greater than the sum of its parts,” Schwartz said. “Working together, [they can] more effectively turn our lives into open books.”

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