Leaks from General Motors’ Cruise robotaxi unit reveal some of their plan to rebuild after their failure in San Francisco may involve working in another state like Texas or Arizona, and to continue the pause on deploying their custom-designed robotaxi known as the Origin. While painful, this plan makes a lot of sense in their current state.

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Earlier, Cruise suffered a long series of setbacks leading to them being pulled from the streets of California, voluntarily halting service in other states and the eventual resignation of their founder/CEO.

Cruise built itself in San Francisco. It’s an obvious choice, given that they company was founded there and their staff live there. It also presents a challenging, but not impossible driving environment where cars can learn most of what they need to drive in any city, but at the same time has no snow to make the task a bit easier. Cruise invested a lot in San Francisco and the idea that it was a great place to learn the ropes.

Politically, it was not at all friendly, and Cruise became quickly at odds with city officials who, though they do not have jurisdiction over driving, wanted it out. To a lesser degree they also wanted Silicon Valley native Waymo out, too.

Cruise also quickly announced plans, and even began production, on a custom vehicle designed to be only a robotaxi. Waymo and most other companies do their service in modified standard cards, though Amazon’s Zoox unit intends to begin with a somewhat similar custom vehicle as well. Making cars is what GM does, of course, so for Cruise this was a natural exploitation of their parent’s skills After Cruise lost their permits, GM paused production on the Origin and this now seems to be indefinite, and Cruise will work to get a robotaxi service working with the regular GM cars (today the Chevy Bolt) they already use.

These are not permanent decisions—Cruise certainly intends to return to SF and to build the Origin—but they are correct decisions for now.

Right Decisions

Even though Cruise says it wants to rebuild trust, and may put a fair bit of effort into that, they have a tough task to do this in San Francisco. SF is biased against it and will continue to be biased against it for some time. Even though they don’t have jurisdiction, they are not without power and influence.

The harsh reality is that SF, though often seen as the world capital of technology, is also sometimes quite the opposite. When the Segway scooter was introduced, the company made a big effort to reach out to towns to make sure it would be legal in them. SF was one of the very few places to ban it before it seriously arrived.

When we were building the Starship delivery robot, we planned to move the company HQ to San Francisco. Then a city supervisor decided to go on a campaign to effectively ban sidewalk delivery robots, and passed laws restricted them where other cities were passing laws to welcome them. Starship elected not to move to SF.

So San Francisco may not, in spite of its many advantages, be a good place to begin. Certainly operating far from where most staff work is a challenge, both in terms of cost, and in giving up the opportunity for all staff to live and work with the product on a regular basis. And indeed, due to the DMV restricting Cruise, the rest of California may not be immediately favorable, though it can’t be avoided in the long term.

While Cruise has had much better relations with the public and governments in Texas and Arizona where it has also deployed, the situation has not been perfect. And obviously people will ask there, “If it got banned in California, why should we want it here?” They must still be answered, as does California, but that answer will be easier to give.

Pausing the Origin is easier. While Waymo is developing a custom robotaxi with Geely Zeekr, it is much more car-like. You can do most of what you need for a long time in regular cars, and if you have to prioritize that’s what you do. It’s a long time before having a custom vehicle like the Origin, Zoox or Waymo/Zeekr will be an important competitive difference. Indeed it’s a long time before competition is a major factor.

There are a few attributes to the Origin that Cruise will miss, though. The first is the ability to serve the disabled. This is a good thing to do, and required by law once you get to real deployment, and it’s likely to improve pubic appraisal of the value of the service—look good by actually doing some good.

Another ability which the Origin did not strictly have is the ability to drive backwards. The Zoox has no front or back, so if it faces a situation where it needs to turn around, it doesn’t need to turn—it just switches direction. This turns out to me more important than initially expected, because it’s a good option when a vehicle encounters a situation like an emergency scene or vehicle, a closed road or any other such problem. Now it is possible for a regular vehicle to drive backwards, as long as it can have red brake lights on the front and white headlights on the back at night. It would be a bit confusing to others on the road (in a way the Zoox would not, since it lacks a front or back.) To avoid that confusion, a vehicle can just reverse until it sees a good spot to quickly do a 3 point turn in a driveway or similar. Electric cars are usually able to go full speed in reverse. If Cruise vehicles had the means to just quickly get back out when they encountered emergency scenes, they might not have angered the SF Fire Department so much.

The final ability of the Origin is that it’s better at delivering a shared ride to a group, like UberPool style rides. This isn’t something companies will do on day one, but it’s their long term answer to those critics who worry that “this is just more private cars clogging the streets.” Unlike UberPool, which had trouble getting riders to accept detours to pick up other people, Robotaxis, when combined with single person pods and minimobility vehicles can create a much more appealing service that customers would like, particularly with the lower prices.

Waymo will become the known brand in San Francisco, but it is so early in the game that they won’t get any monopoly over the next year. There is great debate over how big the first mover advantage really is in the robotaxi space. Of course Waymo also plans to deploy in some of the Texas towns that Cruise has been serving, so they will be competitors of a sorts, but both with fleets too small to saturate the market.

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I founded ClariNet, the world’s first internet based business, am Chairman Emeritus of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and a fellow of the Foresight Institute. My current passion is self-driving vehicles and robots. I worked on Google’s car team in its early years and am an advisor and/or investor for car OEMs and many of the top startups in robocars, sensors, delivery robots and even some flying cars. Plus AR/VR and software. I am founding faculty and computing chair for Singularity University, and I write, consult and speak on robocar technology around the globe.

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San Francisco just moved one step closer to a controversial redesign of a Marina District harbor that would place yachts in front of one of the city’s most iconic views and clean up only some of the pollution the project was initially funded to deal with.

The San Francisco Recreation and Park Commission voted Thursday to move the project forward after an hourslong, sweltering hearing in front of a standing-room-only crowd that booed city staff as they laid out plans. 

The vote came despite an effort by two city leaders to pause the project until more members of the public have a chance to weigh in.

The project would add new, larger boat slips to the harbor, placing parked yachts directly in front of the popular Marina Green promenade. Dozens of people who spoke during public comment at Thursday’s meeting balked at that idea, saying the harbor extension would block the beautiful view of the Marin Headlands and Golden Gate Bridge, transforming one of the city’s most iconic public spaces into an enclave for wealthy yacht owners.

A man walks along the San Francisco Bay Trail at Marina Green, which currently offers an open view of the bay. | Source: Jason Henry for The Standard

“It’s not just for the rich people,” 70-year-old Lower Pac Heights resident Sharon Wong said about the Marina Green. 

Boaters, meanwhile, mourned the potential loss of a training ground for young sailors, while environmental advocates said the project failed to clean up enough pollution on the site.

Wong, who grew up near the city’s densely populated Chinatown, said those open bay views have offered her a lifelong connection to nature. She lamented the potential loss of one of the best places people can come to escape the hustle and bustle of Downtown, where, Wong said, “we don’t have this big expansive nature.”

A map outlines the proposed changes to the San Francisco Marina. The project would relocate boat slips from the southeast corner of the Marina to in front of Marina Green. | Source: Courtesy of San Francisco Rec and Park.

The marina redesign stems from a decadeslong legal battle between San Francisco and PG&E. 

The utility’s former coal gasification plant near the harbor polluted the bay for years, and the city sued in 2001 over chemical compounds called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons discovered in the sediments of the East Harbor, according to the City Attorney’s Office. In 2021, PG&E settled with San Francisco, committing to pay up to $160 million to clean up harbor pollution. The settlement set off a multiyear discussion about how, exactly, to spend the money.

The proposal that came out of the process and went before the commission Thursday would radically change the marina. Many of the boat slips in the East Harbor, also known as Gashouse Cove, would be demolished, leaving a new shallow-water basin open to small boats like kayaks and canoes. Those boat slips would move to an expanded West Harbor, protected by a new breakwater, that would sit directly in front of the Marina Green.

The Recreation and Park Department argues that removing toxic pollutants from the lower East Harbor and rebuilding its boat slips, as many advocates want, would actually increase pollution because there’s natural sediment that covers the toxic material, according to department spokesperson Tamara Aparton.

“Rebuilding rather than relocating the harbor would require this natural sediment cover to be removed to accommodate the dredging required for the return of boats to the area,” Aparton told The Standard. “Removing the sediment cover would generate significant sediment pollution during construction.”

Boats float in the East Harbor at Gashouse Cove in San Francisco. | Source: Jason Henry for The Standard

But critics of the project, including city supervisors Aaron Peskin and Ahsha Safaí, speculate that the decision to leave the toxic material untouched is driven by dollar signs. That’s because the proposed slips in front of the Marina Green would be larger, allowing the department to charge more to park. And the new breakwater would reduce the costly dredging needed to maintain the harbor.

“This can’t be driven by the desire just to make money,” Safaí told The Standard.

Currently, dredging the harbor costs millions, Recreation and Park Department Project Manager Monica Scott said during the meeting. As a result, the department subsidizes the marina with $4 million from its general fund each year, Scott said.

“That is truly the goal that we’re trying to move away from when we talk about financial sustainability for the marina,” Scott said.

The project, as proposed, would spend about $68 million cleaning up pollution and $54 million on harbor renovations, Scott said.

Thursday’s commission vote directed city staff to conduct an environmental analysis of the project, which could take up to two years. In an apparent nod to the overwhelming public opposition to the project, commissioners also directed city staff to look into the financial feasibility of minimizing the number of slips in the West Harbor, where they have the potential to block views.

A person looks out at boats at the San Francisco Marina. | Source: Jason Henry for The Standard

That consolation, however, didn’t sate Marina District resident Erin Roach, who has led opposition to the project.

“At the end of the day, [the Recreation and Park Department] is still trying to divert funds from this settlement to solve a separate issue with the West Harbor,” Roach said. “And in doing so, San Franciscans stand to lose a beloved landmark.”

Thursday’s vote did not bind the project to the current design, and it will come before the commission again once the environmental review wraps up. If it stays on track, construction would begin in 2026.

Whether the wiggle room introduced by the commission Thursday will warm Peskin to the process, which he previously described as authoritarian, is yet to be seen. He’s largely taken issue with a perceived lack of effort on the part of Recreation and Parks to involve community input.

“If the Recreation and Parks Commission doesn’t get the message,” he told The Standard ahead of the vote, “I imagine the Board of Supervisors will cut the funding.”

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Through her nonprofit organization, Imprint City, she has hosted events such as Bayview Live, a music and arts festival that ran from 2016-2019. One challenge she faced promoting events was figuring out how to attract black people to a town that doesn’t have a lot of people who identify as black.

“The landscape here is just not black,” said Fennell, who now works in Mayor London Breed’s administration. “It’s not a black majority, it’s a super-minority. I prefer to plan black events for black people, so I generally have to advertise outside of San Francisco.”

Fennell said predatory lending and soaring home prices are problems that have contributed to the exodus of black residents.

“Without strong economic policies to sustain the black community, it’s all just social policy,” Fennell said. “People need to own where they are. This is the only way they can be stabilized.”

Jameel Rasheed Patterson sees redevelopment as a force of nature, but only if government is in step with the community. Marking a community as derelict, he said, allows the government to make changes without residents’ consent.

“They throw out little code words in the form of dog whistles to suggest that the community doesn’t care about the neighborhood,” said Patterson, associate director of the New Community Leadership Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to empowering disadvantaged communities. “So we have to remove people to transform the neighborhood, then there’s gentrification of pest control.”

How In The Black works

In The Black is funded by the Office of Economic and Workforce Development and the Dream Keeper Initiative, which is directed by the San Francisco Human Rights Commission. dr Sheryl Evans Davis, the commission’s executive director, praised Harris’ selflessness and her ability to focus on a project outside of her comfort zone in the culinary industry.

“I think In The Black gave people a certain level of hope to be able to share spaces and work together,” Davis said. “I think it also opened up the possibility of accessing and activating other rooms even along the Fillmore corridor.”

CIK Apparel hangs at the In The Black store in the Fillmore neighborhood of San Francisco on June 9, 2023. Rent for the marketplace is about $8,000 per month, with businesses paying between $600 and $1,500. According to Harris, In The Black grossed $20,000 in December. Since then, the company’s monthly sales have ranged from about $8,000 to $12,000 due to the fickle retail trends. (Beth LaBerge/KQED)

Still, In The Black manager Joshua Farr hopes the market will expand to cities like Oakland in the near future.

“It’s just business as usual,” said 40-year-old Farr. “We’re trying to learn, to document, and to piece together our history so that we’re able to do it again and do it better, and do it in new spaces and do it for us, even new industries.” .”

Some of the companies currently in business were part of the first SFHDC Minding My Black-Owned Business cohort in 2022. The 12-week pilot program awarded companies $7,500 in grants.

Cianni Jackson participated in the program. She founded her company, CIK Apparel, during the 2020 race riots because she wanted to show the pride and strength inherent in black culture.

A native of Fillmore, Jackson designs and sells jackets, hoodies and other gear featuring unique patches with messages such as “Black Girl Magic” and “Rooting for Everybody Black.” She likes it when people try on her clothes in the store.

“I feel like if you look them in the face, they’ll take it away from you sooner,” said Jackson, 43. “So being in The Black was a great opportunity for me to showcase my projects to the public.”

According to Harris, who is in the process of opening a coffee shop a few blocks from Marketplace, In The Black is currently looking for retailers that sell hair care and other lifestyle essentials.

She would love to stay at the Fillmore again.

“I’m just waiting for the market to get better and then try to take my chance and buy something,” Harris said. “I’m always afraid of having to take a second or third job if all I have to do is maintain my lifestyle.”

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He soon founded a nonprofit social network for entrepreneurs called Mesto — the Russian word for place — hoping to boost the start-up market in Russia and other parts of the former Soviet Union. As he launched a new start-up of his own, Duplicat, which aimed to identify fraud in the market for nonfungible tokens, he contracted with a team of artificial intelligence engineers spread across Russia.

He also invested in several Ukrainian start-ups. One of them was Reface, an AI company recommended by Mr. Podolianko. Last summer, as they met with other companies and colleagues in Kyiv, the two of them attended a boat party whose hosts were a group of Ukrainian technologists and investors. Mr. Podolyanko brought his girlfriend, a Ukrainian financial analyst named Stacy Antipova.

Russia-Ukraine War: Key Developments

Cards 1 of 4

Russia’s punishment of Finland. Russia cut off its natural gas supplies to Finland on May 21, according to Finland’s state energy provider. Russia said that it was suspending the supply because Finland had failed to comply with its demand to make payments in rubles. Finland has also submitted an application to join NATO, approaching Russia.

It was a trip they now look back on with rueful affection. Russia invaded six months later.

After the invasion, Ms. Antipova fled Ukraine and flew to Tijuana, Mexico, where she could cross into the United States as a refugee. She now lives at DobryDom. “When I went down for breakfast the first time,” Mr. Doronichev remembered, “I did not know what to say.”

Sitting in the backyard alongside her new housemates on a recent afternoon, Ms. Antipova was also unsure what to say. “I didn’t plan to move so far away so soon,” she said. “I am just trying to fix my life, to understand what I want to do, because I left the rest of my life behind.”

Across the table, Dasha Kroshkina, another Russian-born entrepreneur, explained that she was working to move employees out of both Russia and Ukraine and scrambling to restart her company’s service, StudyFree, in Africa and India. When the war began, many of its customers — students looking for scholarships and grants at universities abroad — were in Russia.

“We all feel trauma,” said Mikita Mikado, another DobryDom housemate, who immigrated from Belarus. “But the trauma is different for each one of us.”

Mr. Mikado and Mr. Doronichev are now working to move their own employees out of Russia and into European and Asian countries accepting Russian citizens without visas, but not all are willing or able to leave. The two entrepreneurs will cut ties with anyone who stays.

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