Cruise stopped its driverless operations nationwide last week. But the New York Times reports on the company’s moves since then…

– Cruise hired the law firm Quinn Emanuel to investigate its response to a San Francisco incident involving a pedestrian, “including its interactions with regulators, law enforcement and the media.”
– A separate review of the incident is being doncuted by Exponent, a consulting firm that evaluates complex software systems.
– The company’s rivals “fear Cruise’s issues could lead to tougher driverless car rules for all of them.”
– “Cruise employees worry that there is no easy way to fix the company’s problems, said five former and current employees and business partners.”

Company insiders are putting the blame for what went wrong on a tech industry culture — led by 38-year-old [Chief Executive Kyle] Vogt — that put a priority on the speed of the program over safety. In the competition between Cruise and its top driverless car rival, Waymo, Mr. Vogt wanted to dominate in the same way Uber dominated its smaller ride-hailing competitor, Lyft. “Kyle is a guy who is willing to take risks, and he is willing to move quickly. He is very Silicon Valley,” said Matthew Wansley, a professor at the Cardozo School of Law in New York who specializes in emerging automotive technologies. “That both explains the success of Cruise and its mistakes.”

When Mr. Vogt spoke to the company about its suspended operations on Monday, he said that he did not know when they could start again and that layoffs could be coming, according to two employees who attended the companywide meeting. He acknowledged that Cruise had lost the public’s trust, the employees said, and outlined a plan to win it back by being more transparent and putting more emphasis on safety. He named Louise Zhang, vice president of safety, as the company’s interim chief safety officer and said she would report directly to him…

With its business frozen, there are concerns that Cruise is becoming too much of a financial burden on G.M. and is hurting the auto giant’s reputation… The shutdown complicates Cruise’s ambition of hitting its goal of $1 billion of revenue in 2025. G.M. has spent an average of $588 million a quarter on Cruise over the past year, a 42 percent increase from a year ago. Each Chevrolet Bolt that Cruise operates costs $150,000 to $200,000, according to a person familiar with its operations.

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In July “Safe Street Rebels” launched the “Week of Cone” pranks (which went viral on TikTok and Twitter). TechCrunch called it “a bid to raise awareness and invite more pissed-off San Franciscans to submit public comments” to regulatory agencies.

But NPR sees a larger context:

Coning driverless cars fits in line with a long history of protests against the impact of the tech industry on San Francisco. Throughout the years, activists have blockaded Google’s private commuter buses from picking up employees in the city. And when scooter companies flooded the sidewalks with electric scooters, people threw them into San Francisco Bay. “Then there was the burning of Lime scooters in front of a Google bus,” says Manissa Maharawal, an assistant professor at American University who has studied these protests.

She points out that when tech companies test their products in the city, residents don’t have much say in those decisions: “There’s been various iterations of this where it’s like, ‘Oh, yep, let’s try that out in San Francisco again,’ with very little input from anyone who lives here….” Waymo is already giving rides in Phoenix and is testing with human safety drivers in Los Angeles and Austin. And Cruise is offering rides in Phoenix and Austin and testing in Dallas, Houston, Miami, Nashville and Charlotte.

Meanwhile, in San Francisco, members of Safe Street Rebel continue to go out at night and stalk the vehicles one cone at a time.
They’re apparently bicycling activists, judging by their web site, advocating “for car-free spaces, transit equity, and the end of car dominance.” (“We regularly protest the city’s thoughtless reopening of the Upper Great Highway to cars by slowing traffic to show just how unnecessary of a route this road is.”) Their long-term goal is to expand the group “to the point where we can make a city for people to safely walk, bike and take public transit, not a city dominated by cars…”
The last half-century has been a failed experiment with car dominance. They bankrupt our cities, ruin our environment, and force working people to sacrifice an unacceptable amount of their income to pay for basic transpiration. It is time to end car dependence and rethink our streets around public transit, walking and bikes.
Their demands include unredacted data from self-driving car companies about safety incidents (and a better reporting system) — plus a mechanism for actually citing robotaxis for traffic violations. But they also raise concerns about surveillance, noting the possibility of “a city-wide, moving network observing and analyzing everything.”

Their web page says they also want to see studies on the pollution impact of self-driving cars — and whether or not AVs will increase car usage. They support the concerns of San Francisco’s Taxi Workers Alliance about the possibility of lost jobs and increased traffic congestion.

And they raise one more concern:

Their cars are not wheelchair accessible and do not pull up to the curb. Profit-driven robotaxi companies see accessibility as an afterthought. Without enforcement, their promises for the future will likely never materialize. Paratransit and transit are accountable to the public, but Cruise and Waymo are only accountable to shareholders.
But their list of concerns is followed by an exhaustive list of 266 robotaxi incidents documented with links to news articles and social media reports. (“The cars have run red lights, rear-ended a bus and blocked crosswalks and bike paths,” writes NPR. “In one incident, dozens of confused cars congregated in a residential cul-de-sac, clogging the street. In another, a Waymo ran over and killed a dog.”)

NPR’s article adds one final note. “Neither Cruise nor Waymo responded to questions about why the cars can be disabled by traffic cones.”

Thanks to Slashdot reader Tony Isaac for sharing the news.

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It’s 7:00 p.m. in San Francisco’s Mission District. Elango, 52, born in India but Californian by adoption, is about to take his first Waymo self-driving car. Barely three minutes after making the request through the app the vehicle appears: it is a Jaguar surrounded by sensors. Tapping a button on his phone, he unlocks the door, from which a handle comes out. As he enters, relaxing music plays. A female voice welcomes him and asks him to buckle up. The driver’s seat — empty, of course — is pushed all the way forward for his comfort. A screen in the middle of the cabin lets him press a button to begin his futuristic journey.

The vehicle he is riding is known as robotaxi; a driverless, electric vehicle full of sensors and cameras. At the moment, they only move around the most central districts of San Francisco, and never on highways. This California city has become the front line for Silicon Valley’s big technology companies’ effort to control the future of urban mobility.

“I’m so nervous. It’s like the first time I got on a plane. I feel like a kid in a candy store,” Elango says. He seems particularly impressed by the steering wheel moving on its own at the first intersection. “It’s fascinating,” he says, excited. On the three rides he has taken this afternoon (about 15 minutes each), the driving has been smooth; just a little hard brake has altered the peace of the journey, when another car crossed in front.

On average, each trip has cost about $15, and the top speed was 30 miles per hour. “I felt very safe at all times. It’s impressive how the car yielded to pedestrians and looked for the most appropriate place to stop,” he says. The only mistake occurred at the end of the final trip, when the vehicle came to a stop 300 feet from the requested destination..

A passenger enters a Waymo driverless vehicle on Potrero Hill, in San Francisco.Carlos Rosillo

At the moment, the two main companies in the robotaxi business are Waymo and Cruise. Waymo is owned by Alphabet (Google’s parent company) and its vehicles have a more upscale appearance. Its fleet has 250 modified Jaguar I-Pace cars. Cruise belongs to several companies, including General Motors and Microsoft. The Chevy Bolt cars it uses are smaller and have been in operation for less time. Although they have already been authorized to extend their hours, at the moment they only carry users after 9:00 p.m. They have 300 vehicles.

The technology is already available to thousands of users, but there is a waiting list of several months to download the app. Up until the first week of August both platforms were free to use, but after the State of California announced that driverless cabs were allowed to operate 24/7, they started to charge.

Collisions on the road

Waymo communications manager Julia Ilina explains that, since they began operating with users in December, the collisions that have occurred have always been due to human errors from other vehicles. “The safety performance data of our first million miles shows that there have been no injuries or collisions with pedestrians or cyclists. The recorded incidents have always been due to errors on the part of human drivers.”

The Waymo driver, she explains, is much safer than a human for several reasons: “It is equipped with a series of sensors that give it 360-degree peripheral vision day and night, up to three football fields away. Our driver is designed to respect the rules and it does not get distracted, drunk or tired.” Waymo has announced expansion plans in Los Angeles and Austin.

With the arrival of Cruise, the second platform that offers driverless taxi services, the number of these machines doubled. Accidents have also increased, and protest movements against this technology have emerged. The activist group Safe Street Rebel monitors all traffic incidents generated by these autonomous vehicles on its website, and it has launched a campaign to encourage people to place traffic cones on the hoods of the cars in order to disable them.

On August 17, a fire truck responding to an emergency collided with a Cruise robotaxi at an intersection. According to a company statement, the vehicle proceeded through the intersection because the light was green. San Francisco Fire Chief Jeanine Nicholson says that more than 60 driverless cars have interfered with fire trucks since May last year, and complains that these vehicles hinder their work when human lives are at risk. “Our people cannot be paying attention to an autonomous vehicle when we have to raise ladders. I am not against technology; I am in favor of security,” she declared last week.

As a result of the latest incidents, the California Department of Motor Vehicles asked General Motors to halve its operating cars in the city. On August 11, 10 vehicles belonging to this company stopped moving, causing a major traffic jam in North Beach. According to GM, this happened because the 5G network went down due to the massive influx of people attending a music festival.

Tobías, 35, gets in a Cruise robotaxi at the door of his home in the central Fillmore District. This Portuguese man has been using the app since April. He acknowledges that these cars are not yet ready to drive at rush hour, but he takes it as something normal, part of the process. “They are still learning. I think that in the future it will be safer than human driving,” he says. However, he has seen some changes in the last few months. “I have noticed that now they drive somewhat more aggressively. At the beginning they were too slow; that was also a problem.”

During the ride, the car goes around certain areas for no apparent reason. “The route is not optimal at all; it clearly avoids areas that for some reason it doesn’t want to cross. A 10-minute journey can take 15 minutes. Also, sometimes there is a message on the screen saying that someone is taking control of the car remotely.” Another thing that worries Tobías is that he feels watched. “There are cameras and microphones that are always on, and sometimes a person will talk to you, ask if everything is going well.”

The Taxi Workers Alliance has also expressed concern about the danger that competition from this technology poses to their future, and called a protest before the State of California legislated in favor of these services. “Taxi drivers are the canaries in the coal mine in the future onslaught of artificial intelligence,” said Mark Gruberg, a member of the union’s executive board.

Gulshan has been an UBER driver for eight years. It is 10:00 p.m. and he still has a few hours left to finish his shift behind the wheel of his shiny white Tesla. He has come to terms with the imminent arrival of artificial intelligence behind the wheel. “I used to be a taxi driver, and I made more money. When the platforms arrived I decided to change. Now there’s this… I think resisting technology is pointless,” he reflects. However, he does not see a close threat yet, because “those cars are very expensive, and I don’t think they can interpret situations, especially in exceptional circumstances, as we do.”

An operator from the Beep company and a passenger inside a self-driving bus. Carlos Rosillo

A pilot project with buses

In another area of the city, far from the center, in Treasure Island, a pilot project with autonomous buses from the company Beep is being carried out. However, these small vehicles with seating capacity for 11 passengers still require someone on board to supervise them. Marvin Saucer, an operator who previously worked testing cars at Tesla and GM Cruise, awaits travelers on board. He holds a controller with two levers to take over if something goes wrong. “I receive people, make sure they buckle up.” He also does public relations. “I am a sociable person, I like talking to people,” he says.

The bus travels about three miles with seven stops in an area with no traffic lights and hardly any traffic. The complete service, which is free, takes 15 minutes. Eric Young, a spokesman for the agency that manages mobility on Treasure Island, says that they are working to get a second Beep shuttle. “The idea is to better understand how this innovation could meet the needs of our residents and give them the chance to learn about driverless technology.” Beep already has two similar shuttles operating 30 miles from Treasure Island, in San Ramón. Just like the robotaxis, robotic buses are also a reality in San Francisco.

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(J. The Jewish News of Northern California via JTA) — Ask a rabbi about self-driving cars and you’d better be ready for a long answer.

Self-driving cars — also known as robotaxis, autonomous vehicles or driverless cars — with their whirring sensors and their odd, almost tentative movements, have become a familiar sight on the streets of San Francisco.

Familiar they might be, but not without controversy. With local incidents of self-driving cars trying to drive into active fire zones, stalling en masse and even crashing into a fire truck this month, reports of autonomous misconduct have been plentiful. Regardless, the California Public Utilities Commission in mid-August expanded commercial robotaxi service to daytime hours in San Francisco for GM’s Cruise and Alphabet’s Waymo autonomous vehicle divisions. City officials are opposed to the expansion, citing safety and other concerns.

And yet the all-electric fleets offer intriguing Shabbat possibilities — not least for observant Jews who traditionally refrain from driving and using electricity on the day. So what do local rabbis say?

“As an Orthodox Jew, in order to evaluate new realities, they are going to try and understand how they work and categorize them within already existing precedent in Jewish law,” said Rabbi Joel Landau of Adath Israel, an Orthodox synagogue in San Francisco.

There is one existing piece of technology that might offer a clue, he said. It’s the Shabbat elevator, which automatically stops and opens its doors at each floor, negating the need to press a button. 

It may seem that an autonomous vehicle, if pre-programmed, could possibly meet the same requirements as a Shabbat elevator. But Landau said it’s not that simple.

“Not everyone is happy with a Shabbat elevator,” he said.  

Many elevators make adjustments based on the weight of the passenger, he said, which negates their neutrality, so to speak. By contrast, a running escalator or moving walkway might be OK.

If self-driving cars react to a passenger’s weight or position, that alone might rule them out for Shabbat use among observant Jews. The same is true if riders would need to activate anything to start the ride. Landau said he’s sure the technological know-how to make a Shabbat-compliant autonomous electric car could be developed. He’s just not sure it should be.

The issue of driving on Shabbat was addressed in the Conservative movement back in the 1950s when rabbis allowed driving to synagogue for services as Jews moved into the suburbs and lived too far from shul to walk. Still, the movement does not encourage driving on Shabbat.

“The ideal is that one does not drive on Shabbat and that people live close by to their Jewish communities — to walk to synagogue, share meals, raise families,” Rabbi Amanda Russell of Congregation Beth Sholom, a Conservative synagogue in San Francisco, wrote in an email to J.

But not everyone can reach that ideal, she said. “We know that to be in community on Shabbat, many people have to drive.” 

But what about self-driving robotaxis? Would they be better than driving?

“Funny you should ask about this,” Russell said. “These cars have become a small topic of conversation at Beth Sholom, simply because they are taking up precious parking spots in the early morning for daily minyan and on Shabbat!”

Annoyance aside, Russell said the question comes down to the way the cars operate, what they are used for and whether they undermine the spirit of Shabbat. If “pre-arranged and prepaid,” she said, self-driving cars could be “more ideal” on Shabbat than someone driving even an electric car.

So how do self-driving cars really work? Could they really be Shabbat-compliant?

To put it simply, an autonomous car is equipped with an array of sensors and imaging devices, including cameras and LIDAR, which is the spinning device atop the cars that uses light to measure distance. While GPS helps the car map its route, it’s all those sensors that help the car navigate a chaotic street environment.

Right now, riders access the cars through apps on their phones, but pre-arranging a robotaxi pickup is possible. 

“To make it permissible, one would want to make the arrangements before Shabbat: pickup and drop-off locations, payment, etc.” Russell said. “That would prevent the passenger from having to use their phone, any ride-share-related technology and any form of money, all of which are prohibited on Shabbat.”

Russell and Landau both said that focusing on keeping the spirit of Shabbat is a crucial guide. Landau said that even if self-driving cars can technically be used — an assumption that hasn’t been truly tested yet — he doesn’t believe that most observant Jews will tap on the Waymo app a few minutes before sundown on Friday.

“Not everything you could do, you should do,” Landau said. 

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The passenger shows the view from the backseat of the car.

Over the past few months, hundreds of self-driving cars have been spotted on the streets of the US’ San Francisco. Recently, a passenger shared a similar experience where he was picked up by a driverless car when he called for a Uber ride. 

He shared a video of his experience, showing the view from the backseat of the car. Meanwhile, at the front, there is an empty driver’s seat with the steering wheel moving autonomously. Various prompts are displayed on a tablet fastened to the rear of the passenger’s seat. Further, voice prompts with instructions can also be heard playing inside the car.

The video’s caption reads, ”Getting a Uber in San Francisco be like…” 

Watch the video here:

Getting a Uber in San Francisco be like…
by u/Osobady in Damnthatsinteresting

“Lol, when I was a teen, video calls were sci-fi stuff only seen in a few movies, and here we are with ‘automatic taxis’ feeling old,” wrote one user. Another joked, ”To unlock doors, please pay the release fee now.”

“Scary. No thank you,” a third said, while a fourth added, ”Objectively speaking, The human drivers are just as scary or worse.”

A few months back, tech billionaire Bill Gates took a ride in a self-driving car through downtown London and was convinced that autonomous vehicles (AV) are the future. 

”The car drove us around downtown London, which is one of the most challenging driving environments imaginable, and it was a bit surreal to be in the car as it dodged all the traffic,” Mr. Gates wrote in a blog post describing his experience. 

However, he noted that the transition to fully autonomous cars is probably decades away.

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Self-driving taxis are ferrying passengers across San Francisco and Phoenix, and they could be coming to a street near you very soon.

The two leading robotaxi companies, GM’s Cruise and Alphabet’s Waymo, are expanding commercial services to cities across the country, including Austin, Los Angeles, Miami, and New York City. They’re scaling up fast, and a third company, Amazon’s Zoox, is playing catch-up.

On August 10, the California Public Utilities Commission handed Cruise and Waymo a victory by allowing them to operate across San Francisco at all hours and charge fares. During a six-and-a-half-hour hearing, hundreds of residents testified for and against the robotaxis. Supporters claimed they were safer and more reliable than human-driven vehicles, and disabled people said they were more accessible, especially for service animals. Opponents, including transit and fire officials, argued that the taxis had repeatedly gotten in the way of emergency responders and had become a nuisance.

The very next day, Cruise cars snarled traffic in the city’s North Beach neighborhood after the Outside Lands Music Festival being held in the western part of the city caused wireless service problems and the cars lost contact with their central office. The traffic meltdown was proof to many that the cars were not ready for a larger rollout.

Then, on Wednesday, August 16 — less than a week after California regulators lifted restrictions on Cruise and Waymo — San Francisco officials asked for that approval to be halted, arguing the city “will suffer serious harm” with the services expanded to daytime hours.

Liz Lindqwister, a data journalist at the nonprofit news startup the San Francisco Standard, has been documenting the bumpy expansion of robotaxis — while using them herself to commute around town.

“People like to say that San Francisco is at the heart of the robotaxi revolution. And they’re practically everywhere in the city now. You can see them crawling on every single street,” Lindqwister said.

To learn more about riding in cars with robots, Today, Explained host Sean Rameswaram spoke to Lindqwister on Vox’s daily news explainer podcast. Read on for a partial transcript of the conversation, edited and condensed for length and clarity, and listen to the full conversation wherever you find podcasts.

This isn’t an experiment. This is the future. This is reality.

It’s very real. And it’s happening right in my backyard. You’ll see them every single day when you’re going to work. I’ve taken them out to go get drinks with friends and stuff, and they’ve become about as ubiquitous as an Uber or a Lyft.

I did not know it was so ubiquitous that people were just taking them out to go get drinks with their friends on a Friday night or whatever. What was the experience like?

It’s very surreal because in a lot of ways the experience of riding in a robotaxi is just like an Uber. It’s a normal car. When you’re in a Waymo, it’ll be a Jaguar …

A Jaguar robot car?!

Yeah, it’s very bougie. It feels very fancy and luxurious. But you’ll just be riding through town, and it just doesn’t have a driver. You’ll see the wheel moving and spinning and the pedals going, but there won’t be any driver up front.

Do you tip the robot taxi?

I have never tipped a robot taxi. Maybe that makes me a stingy rider, but I don’t really feel the need to tip the technology.

Does it ask you to tip the robot driver?

No, it doesn’t. And in the case of Waymo, it wasn’t able to even charge me for rides up until literally Thursday of last week. Basically, this robotaxi revolution really got kicked into high gear last Thursday because of this big state vote by the California Public Utilities Commission.

There were dozens of people who lined up outside of the meeting on Thursday, and they gave six hours of public comment to say how much they really dislike these cars or how much they love them. Waymo and Cruise, they had a pretty big contingent there and support. Mothers Against Drunk Driving like to support Cruise because they like to plug that these robotaxis are safer than the average driver.

On the flip side, there’s just a whole slew of people that have seen how they’ve really disrupted life in San Francisco. There’s been a lot of pushback from city officials, from the fire department, and from local activists who really don’t want to see more cars on the street. But it still passed. They basically granted these robotaxis the ability to expand, unlimited, through all parts of the city and drive all hours of the day and charge money for it, basically making them like taxis.

So these rides were free for a time. How much are they now that they’re not free?

It depends on the company, because until now, Cruise was actually able to charge for its rides. The confusing part about this is that different companies had different rules. But basically Waymo hasn’t released its pricing model. They say that there’s going to be a base fee, and that there’s going to be cost per mile, cost per time. And the same thing with Cruise, except Cruise has been more public about their base fee of $5 and the additional costs on top of it.

How is this changing the experience of calling a cab? Are people doing different things in the car now that they’re alone?

In some of my reporting, we found that people are starting to do debaucherous things or unseemly things in the car. We found a handful of people who had either had sex or hooked up in the back of a robotaxi because there’s just no driver to tell you you can’t do that. And I’d imagine the same goes for alcohol or drugs. The companies obviously don’t plug this as something that you should do in their vehicles.

Why not?! Is sex illegal in San Francisco?

Definitely not in robotaxis, according to some of our more adventurous readers.

Well, have there been any problems yet with these robocars?

That’s an understatement, honestly. It’s pretty crazy. These cars will just get caught. Let’s say there are 10 fire trucks coming down to stop a blaze in San Francisco. The Cruise cars don’t know what to do. They’ll just brick up on the street and not move. The issue with that is that they’ll be blocking traffic. They’ll be blocking the emergency vehicles.

So they crumble under pressure.

They definitely crumble under pressure. And they were put to the test this Friday. San Francisco has this pretty famous music festival called Outside Lands. Tens of thousands of people attend. It’s a really big event for the city. And Cruise and Waymo were still operating around the park where the festival was held.

This was day one of the new world that we were living in in San Francisco.

Day one of the new world. And they had a meltdown. As many as a dozen stalled Cruise cars blocked the streets in a neighborhood in the north part of the city. The company said that it was because all of the people at Outside Lands disrupted the cellphone signal or the signal that the Cruise cars use to operate.

The robots blamed the people.

Yeah, the robots blamed the people. A lot of people said that the robotaxis just couldn’t handle the floods of people walking on the street. They’ll just stop. And it’s kind of funny to see because the cars kind of look clueless. And there’s no driver in them either. So you really can’t yell at them to move or honk at them either. I think something that people don’t talk enough about too, with Cruise, is that they’re such cute little cars, that it really, truly is comical when they mess up.

But of course, it’s all cute and fun until someone gets hurt. And hearing that these cars just have a meltdown when there’s emergency vehicles flying through a crowded street or when there’s lots of people around is concerning.

Yeah. Having driven in so many robotaxis at this point, it’s most interesting to see humans’ relationships to these robot cars and not necessarily the robot cars themselves. When I’m inside them, I’ll see people flipping me off or just glaring or yelling at me because they feel so strongly about it. They’re so frustrated with these dinky little robot cars.

They’re also coning the cars. It sounds funny, but it’s literally traffic cones that activists are placing on top of robotaxi sensors so that they can’t move. The city has even taken it into their own hands where, a firefighter in an emergency situation, they coned a Cruise car because they didn’t want it to keep moving into an emergency situation.

Even the firefighters are getting in on it. So it hasn’t been a totally smooth transition. But that’s sort of to be expected, I imagine.

Yeah. And I think the big question now, too, is where this is going to fit in in the broader transportation landscape of not just San Francisco, but the state and the country. We have Ubers and Lyfts that still exist. But I imagine a lot of those drivers are frustrated that there are all these self-driving cars that might take their positions.

And then, of course, there are transit problems with funding in San Francisco and the Bay Area. Our public transportation system is really struggling. So for another car option, private option, to show up like this, that gets a lot of folks really frustrated. Like, is this the right use of our time, of our priorities, of our funding? I don’t know.

Right. Is the answer more cars?

Yeah, And that’s a lot of the criticism, is that San Francisco’s a dense city. It’s a small city. Does it really need thousands more of these robotaxis?

It sounds like what you’re saying is that people ought to get used to the idea of being driven around by robots.

I think the CPUC vote basically said that. Whether or not San Franciscans like it, robotaxis are here to stay. And now they have unlimited access to the city and can charge money for it. And there are a lot of people excited about it. Waymo likes to say that they have a wait list of over 100,000 people. That’s a lot of people that are excited to drive in their cars.

Or it’s just 100,000 people who are really excited about having sex in a robot car.

I mean, you said it, not me!

At the end of the day, it’s definitely a novelty to try out one of these cars. My parents are going to come visit in a month, and that’ll be the first thing I do, is show them the future in a robotaxi.

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• Riders are reportedly using San Francisco’s self-driving taxis, operated by Cruise, to hook up.
• A 2018 study predicted that more autonomous vehicles could mean more sex on the road.
• The cars have cameras and microphones for safety, and Cruise prohibits “inappropriate behavior.”

With no one in the front seat driving, some people are using self-driving taxis for a little bit more than just transportation.

The San Francisco Standard spoke to four separate individuals in the city who said they have either fooled around or had sex in one of the robotaxis from autonomous vehicle company Cruise over the last few months.

Cruise and Waymo have been operating fully driverless vehicles in San Francisco since early 2022, and got the go-ahead last week from the city to further expand their services and offer fully driverless rides 24/7 going forward. Cruise operates about 300 vehicles at night and 100 during the day, the company revealed at a California Public Utilities Commission hearing, according to the Standard. Waymo has a fleet of 250 robotaxis in service, a spokesperson confirmed to Insider.

“It seems like I’m a trailblazer,” one passenger told the Standard. The publication granted him and all others named in the piece anonymity, but referred to him by the alias Alex. “It’s also fun to realize that this is like the first place you can do this in the country.” 

Alex told the Standard that he’s had sex in robotaxis three times. 

One of Alex’s partners in robotaxi sex, whom the Standard called Megan, said that her encounter with Alex was her first time ever riding in an autonomous vehicle.

“Was it the most comfortable? Was it the most ideal? Probably not,” Megan told the Standard. “But the fact that we were out and about in public, the whole taboo of it being kind of wrong made it more fun and exciting.” 

A 2018 study by Scott Cohen and Debbie Hopkins in the Annals of Tourism Research journal predicted that passengers might use robotaxis for sex.

“Hotels-by the hour are likely to be replaced by connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs),” the researchers wrote. “This will have implications for urban tourism, as sex plays a central role in many tourism experiences. Such private CAVs may also be put to commercial use, as it is just a small leap to imagine Amsterdam’s Red Light District ‘on the move.”

When a porn video of a couple having sex in a moving Tesla on Autopilot surfaced in 2019, Tesla CEO Elon Musk seemed unsurprised, tweeting “Turns out there’s more ways to use Autopilot than we imagined. Shoulda seen it coming…”

Insider reported at the time — when access to self-driving cars wasn’t nearly as accessible to the public as it is now — that most autonomous cars would likely have security or surveillance in place through cameras or other monitoring, though the researchers point out in the study that surveillance could be “rapidly overcome, disabled, or removed.” In other words, people can get pretty creative in figuring out ways around these systems.

Both Cruise and Waymo do have cameras and microphones inside their self-driving vehicles as well as on the outside, which the companies say are used for safety and rider support. Cruise says on its website videos from its vehicles are used for customer support, safety reasons, vehicle maintenance, security, operations, or if legally required. Both companies say on their websites that microphones are only active during rider support calls. Cruise’s community rules also specify that passengers are required to wear a seatbelt.

Waymo declined Insider’s request for comment.

“When users sign up to use the Cruise platform, they agree to follow our Community Rules which explicitly condemn any illegal activity or inappropriate behavior while using our service,” Cruise told Insider in a statement.

Since having sex in a vehicle within public view would certainly constitute “inappropriate behavior,” it’s safe to say you’re definitely not allowed to have sex in a Cruise robotaxi. But if that isn’t stopping everyone, the company may find itself tasked with enforcing that rule a bit more often than it would like.

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The Tesla Model S. Photo: Tesla.

The word “automobile” entered the English lexicon in the late 18th century from French, a combination of the Ancient Greek autós (αὐτός) meaning “self” and the Latin mobilis meaning “mobile”. Originally, the word referred to the transition from artificial vehicles that no longer relied on external energy sources such as horses, but instead were powered by their own engines. Now it seems ironic that the word itself heralded the advent of truly “self-driving” vehicles.

Self-driving vehicles are fast becoming a reality in the automotive industry today. To be considered fully autonomous, a self-driving vehicle must both specify a path from point A to B and be able to navigate the route safely on its own and without human intervention. Currently, this ongoing work relies on a combination of sensors reading the external environment (e.g. cameras, radar, lidar, etc.) and artificial intelligence (AI) to understand the feedback.

The companies developing self-driving cars range from Audi to Google, although Google’s Waymo has already launched its own fully autonomous commercial ridesharing service, Waymo One, in partnership with Lyft. The service is currently being tested but is currently available in the US cities of Phoenix, San Francisco and soon Los Angeles.

Steve Mahan, former director of the Santa Clara Valley Blind Center, stands next to a Waymo self-driving car in San Francisco on Tuesday. Photo: Eric Risberg/ Associated Press.

The technology race for self-driving cars is in line with the rise of Web3 and Big Data, where data is not only decentralized, but also leveraged for machine learning and AI – digitizing manual processes into automatic processes and beyond that obscuring layers and layers of hardware to smooth, clean interfaces that seamlessly operate a variety of software programs at the touch of a finger.

Self-driving cars are nothing short of an engineering marvel, but at the same time they challenge the definition of what constitutes a good car. Sustainability, road safety and comfort are aspects of automotive engineering in which all car manufacturers want to excel. But the omission of the driver himself seems to turn the car into a whole different beast. So maybe in the world of luxury cars we shouldn’t be asking what makes a good car, but what makes a loved car.

Sean Connery with the Aston Martin DB5 at Stoke Poges while filming Goldfinger, 1964.
Photo: United Artists, Danjaq LLC.

The driver makes the car

Call it what you will: an effective marketing model or consumer-focused branding; Cars are defined by the people who drive them. It can be a bit of a chicken-and-egg puzzle trying to figure out which came first: the discursive image of the ideal car owner, or the loyal car lovers themselves. Regardless, the relationship between cars and the people who love, own, or hope to own them is different , an intimate relationship – a relationship based on the sheer euphoric act of driving.

Video: Aston Martin.

For proof, look no further than the most famous car in history: James Bond’s Aston Martin DB5. The DB5 has captured the hearts of many car enthusiasts since its debut in 1963, not least because of its agent 007 at the wheel, but also because of the importance of driving it. Between chasing bad guys down winding cobblestone streets and cruising silently from one city to another in the middle of the night like international spies do, the films only show what the car was built for: working like a beast.

Daniel Craig’s Bond maneuvers an aggressive turn in the DB5 in No Time To Die, 2021. Photo: Danjaq LLC, Universal, MGM.

One of the fastest cars in the world at the time, the DB5 featured a naturally aspirated 4.0-litre in-line six producing 282 hp and 380 Nm. All power was sent to the rear wheels through a five-speed manual gearbox. Cornering with the DB5 is just a step away from hardcore, although on such vehicles the heavier the steering, the less effort required mid-corner. However, the engine more than makes up for this with its smooth, graceful handling at tremendous speeds, living up to the DB5’s grand tourer status. Even modern GTs with their sophisticated suspension geometry and adaptive damping would hardly be able to keep up with this senior in terms of driving comfort.

Sean Connery’s Bond cruises the countryside in the DB5 in Thunderball, 1965. Photo: United Artists, Danjaq LLC.

At the wheel of the car is a more than well-tuned, comfortable leather seat that offers the driver additional visibility, as well as a generously dimensioned, tactile wooden steering wheel paired with a pleasantly delicate gear knob, which ensure your driving pleasure. It’s also known that the pedals are so flimsy that the rider feels awkward in everyday sneakers, almost as if they’re asking you to put on a pair of shiny oxfords. The wind noise over the front fenders due to the lack of soundproofing is downright pleasing and reminds the driver that they are already really accelerating.

Inside a preserved DB5 from the 1960s. Photo: Car, UK.

The dainty shift knob of the original DB5. Photo: Car, UK.

The DB5 was discontinued in 1965 but received a special limited edition of 25 examples in 2020 to coincide with the release of the final Daniel Craig Bond film No Time To Die – a testament not only to its firm place in automotive history as an agent 007 car, but also out of a love for cars that were meant to be learned, almost fought for and ultimately driven masterfully. The 2020 DB5 costs a whopping $3.6 million. Could a switch to self-driving cars be endured when a name as iconic as the DB5 is at the heart of the luxury car? Without James Bond to ably take the wheel, the iconic DB5 seems to lose a large part of what makes it so popular.

The sequel to the 2020 Aston Martin DB5 Goldfinger. Photo: Aston Martin

Disruption of the automotive industry

Perhaps it is this lack of identity that defines the self-driving car. After all, autonomous vehicles are not made to be driven – they were created to serve social purposes. In the US, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates that 94% of major accidents are due to human error, including intoxication or negligence. Self-driving cars are said to be an answer to the inherent problem of human effort – the risk of failure due to exhaustion. In addition to the goal of increasing road safety, the autonomous vehicle industry also promises to help reduce the carbon footprint through greater fuel efficiency and self-driving carsharing.

A Waymo One car avoids a fatal crash involving a scooter. Photo: Twitter @tsimonite

Autonomous trucks are being tested in the US and Europe in hopes of improving long-distance truck drivers’ safety and job quality, while Beijing, China is in the process of deploying autonomous street sweepers around the city. These projects are disrupting the automotive industry by fundamentally changing the way cars are engineered. In this sense, cars are not made for the driver, but are designed to compensate for the driver’s inherent limitations.

Autonomous urban maintenance vehicles developed by Chinese internet search giant Baidu Inc. sweep streets in Shunyi District, Beijing, September 2018. Photo by Yuan Yi/ China Daily

Nevertheless, fully autonomous cars are far from finished, there are countless reports of errors and accidents. The technology is growing, but very slowly. The problem of growth and scaling in the industry is perhaps most clearly illustrated by Elon Musk’s Tesla in 2021, when he first announced that he would have “over a million full-car Tesla cars on the road.” , was lost -drive hardware”. Tesla stock could see a rebound this summer, but it can only be described as “volatile” and “risky.” The price hit a 52-week low of just over $100 per share back in January and was up more than 130% in June. Musk has struggled with supply chain disruptions since 2021 and is keen to cut costs to improve its margins and produce a more marketable and affordable self-driving car.

Musk at Tesla’s 2021 AGM. Photo: Youtube @tesla

His crosshairs landed on radar technology, a core component of the autonomous vehicle’s ability to detect hazards at a distance. Without radar, Teslas would be prone to basic perception errors and worse, accidents and collisions. In the past two years, reports have mounted of Teslas misreading road signs, braking aggressively from high speeds because of imaginary hazards, and even having fatal accidents. The rush to scale and cut costs might be typical of any tech startup, but it’s almost at odds with the spirit of the luxury car.

Luxury is consistency

What remains of the luxury car figure after all the innovation and design has passed? The truth is that a true luxury car represents the unattainable. Multi-million dollar prices notwithstanding, the top cars in the luxury car world are as rare as fine jewels. They inspire driving pleasure, not so much for the luxurious driving experience, but because most people can only dream of driving one.

Hong Kong star Aaron Kwok admires his private collection of luxury cars. Photo by : Prestige

Self-driving and luxury cars seem to have one thing in common: they are both not designed to be driven. The former disrupts what a car is by removing the driver and aiming to perform as many human functions as possible – a rush for innovation and creativity. However, the latter focuses on refining a car by emphasizing an individual driver’s experience, striving for perfection and being so coveted that it becomes rare and only seen on the road when its lucky owner decides decides to take it for a spin. Therein lies the euphoria of driving a luxury car and sitting in a seat that everyone has always loved.

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The California Convention passed AB 316 by a vote of 54 to 3. The bill includes a provision mandating the presence of a human driver in autonomous trucks during testing, which the Teamsters union had campaigned for. This is just an Assembly bill: to become law, it would need a Senate equivalent and the governor’s signature.

Earlier, San Francisco regulators, also lobbied by the Teamsters, turned down a petition by Waymo to convert warehouse space into employee parking at a new facility in an industrial area in southwest San Francisco. The parking had already been overwhelmingly approved by lower bodies, but descriptions of the meeting suggest the conflict between the Robotaxi companies and the city has escalated, and the denial of that parking request makes it seem like that’s about it and not about it about whether these parking spaces exist spaces are appropriate.

Robocar developers always anticipated that there would be a backlash as the technology became more real. Some of the backlash will be emotional or come from those who feel commercially threatened by the technology. Some will be entitled to the public safety and traffic disruption issues to be expected when trying out new technologies like this. On the issue of job preservation – many drivers drive drivers for a living – there is sympathy on both sides for those who feel their careers are threatened, but concerns about efforts to protect a dangerous and uncomfortable job just to keep jobs alive can stay. Such efforts have typically not stood the test of history, nor have they been retrospectively counted as good when they did.

For trucking, having drivers in trucks controlled by computers is obviously ridiculous in the long run. All teams are currently doing this to ensure safety. Their systems are immature and they know it. But all plans depend on that driver eventually being removed, as has already happened for robotaxis around the city. If the law passes, the driver will have to be there at least until 2029, when the DMV can issue a report with recommendations to remove the driver recommendation.

Outside of the state, several trucking companies are already conducting driverless tests, and one company, Gatik, is making regular daily deliveries without a security driver in the vehicle. Waiting until 2029 in California essentially pushes the tech out of the state, even though many of the companies have a strong presence there. Once something is banned, it becomes very difficult to get the ban lifted, as the officials who lift the ban practically take responsibility if something goes wrong. So they are afraid of it. They don’t want to take any risks, even legitimate risks, and face the consequences.

In fact, all of the companies that develop trucks have protested this bill and hope the governor will refuse to sign the bill. California is the world leader in autonomous driving technology and needs serious thought about deliberately giving up that lead as a union tries to keep jobs for its members. You should look for other ways to lessen the burden on these union members. The hard truth is that 2,000 people die in truck accidents every year in the US – many of them truck drivers. Keeping jobs is one thing, but keeping a job that kills so many people is harder to justify. It’s different than getting jobs that don’t cause deaths.

SF vs Robotaxi

It is likely that the fight in San Francisco will continue to escalate. The state has the right to regulate the roads, not the city. This has frustrated the city, which wants more influence over how robotic taxis work there. The city is frustrated at their powerlessness and seems to feel that the Robotaxi companies took advantage of them and didn’t show the city enough respect. Whether that’s true or not, feelings and perceptions matter more in such a battle, and the city has no means of asserting itself against the companies that operate there.

San Francisco executives meeting in San Francisco (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu) The vote to block Waymo was unanimous among those present.Copyright 2023 The Associated Press. All rights reserved

The jurisdictional boundary between state and city exists for a reason. If each city had too much power for different road rules, it could create chaos for motorists and businesses dealing with a difficult patchwork of regulators. Waymo and Cruise are based in the SF Bay Area, and that city is by far the best testing ground for both, but they may be starting to regret the issues that come with it. Despite being the big city in the high-tech capital of the world, San Francisco has a surprisingly insane history as a proving ground for the new technologies being manufactured there. That’s his choice, but it makes it harder for companies to work there.

In the past, that wasn’t a problem for SF. It had more than enough reputation to deter a few companies. Today, the shift to working from home has emptied downtown San Francisco more than any other city in the US, and one has to be wary of scaring companies even more to work there. SF has shown that even if it can’t regulate your technology, it will use its more mundane powers like planning permission to get what it wants. And they should win this fight if they want to and oust the companies – the real question is why would they want that. Yes, being the beta tester of such technology comes with problems. But a study by the SF Transportation Authority, which asked their drivers to log any problems with the robo-taxis, found surprisingly few incidents. Companies make mistakes and have many teething troubles, but it seems to be anecdotal, not a pattern, it is mistaken for a pattern.

The city must decide how many childhood illnesses it can tolerate, and then grit its teeth and tolerate them. As long as no one is harmed, technology promises to significantly reduce traffic risk in the future, and a few blunders may well be worth it, for society and even for the city.

A passive-aggressive struggle, with cities scrambling to find another way to get rid of these companies, isn’t good for either side. The sides should reconcile or separate, costly as that may be. Waymo may already be hoping for a better time in Los Angeles — that remains to be seen. Arizona and Texas have already shown they are ready to move forward. The problem is that San Francisco didn’t ask for tech to come to the city — it was born there, so it was never a welcome immigrant. A background fight does no harm to anyone.

Waymo will solve his parking problem. In fact, an obvious solution is to use a staging lot and have Waymo vehicles pick up employees from there. It’s a bit cumbersome, but a good test of a mode that will be necessary as robo-taxis prepare to handle things like stadiums and large buildings with high peak traffic. Doing it on a small scale is more expensive – you don’t want employees to have to wait more than a few minutes for a shuttle, but at this point that cost can be managed. But in the long run, finding a way to get SF on board is important.

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I founded ClariNet, the world’s first Internet-based company, am Chair Emeritus of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a Fellow of the Foresight Institute. My current passion are self-driving vehicles and robots. I worked on Google’s auto team in the early years and am a consultant and/or investor for automakers and many of the top startups in robocars, sensors, delivery robots and even some flying cars. Plus AR/VR and software. I found the faculty and computer science chair at Singularity University and I write, consult and speak on robocar technology around the globe.

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When in San Francisco, you don’t necessarily have to hail one of Cruise’s robo-taxis. Company CEO Kyle Vogt has announced that Cruise is now licensed to operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week throughout San Francisco. Only employees have access to the entire region during this time. However, for the first time, Cruise is also opening day trips for public “power users”. While you initially only have access to a limited part of the city (primarily Pacific Heights, Richmond, and Sunset), it’s now a matter of where you are, not when you go.

Employees have been driving during the day for months. San Francisco officials have resisted expanding access to robotic taxis from Cruise and Alphabet’s Waymo, fearing the companies are moving too fast. There have been incidents of driverless cars blocking traffic, including emergency vehicles. The city’s transportation authority has instead pushed for limited rollouts with incremental expansions.

Alright folks, we did it. I’ve been waiting for this day for almost 10 years.

I’m proud to announce that @Cruise is now running 24/7 across San Francisco!

This is a pivotal moment for our business.

Let me tell you why (1/6) pic.twitter.com/UqCMgozrWX

— Kyle Vogt (@kvogt) April 25, 2023

There’s no timeline for wider deployments elsewhere, but Vogt promises operations will ramp up in other cities “soon.” The successful deployment in San Francisco is a “litmus test” for robotic taxis in other cities, the executive claims. The city’s challenging terrain, unusual roads and wet weather are daunting for sensors for self-driving cars.

The broader access could help GM’s own brand gain an edge over Waymo. Cruise was the first company to start charging for self-driving trips in San Francisco. Now it can provide non-stop service for some passengers. Waymo still has an advantage in areas like Phoenix, where it’s requiring public rides for a while, but it clearly has a tougher fight ahead.

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