The Robotaxi State of affairs in SF Is Transferring Quick. Right here’s a FAQ to Steer You By means of It | by Kristi Coale | Aug, 2023

Cars keep screwing up. Companies won’t share key data. Some regulators say OK, others call for service cuts. What the heck’s going on?

Take the Cannoli? One of Cruise’s cutely named robotaxis maneuvers through Hayes Valley traffic earlier this year. (Photo: Alex Lash)

San Francisco’s acceleration into 24/7 autonomous vehicle service lasted barely a week before having to pump the brakes. About 10 days ago, the state Department of Motor Vehicles requested that Cruise cut its SF robotaxi fleet in half — down to 50 during the day and 150 at night — after several alarming incidents, including a collision with a fire truck.

The mishaps took place just after the California Public Utilities Commission voted to allow Cruise and rival Waymo to roll out unlimited service on Aug. 10 after more than five hours of passionate public comment both for and against the robocars. Commissioner John Reynolds, previously a top attorney for Cruise, based his approval on the power of regulators to keep the companies in check.

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(Editor’s note: The Frisc covered the meeting live; start here for the blow-by-blow.)

The DMV’s request shows this system appears to have worked, at least in this instance; Cruise is complying. But road safety advocate Shaun Kildare has a different take: “Waiting for crashes to happen isn’t the way to go about safety,” says Kildare, senior director of research for Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety.

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SF’s Municipal Transportation Agency is in charge of streets, bike lanes, public transit, and taxis too (the ones with a human at the wheel). But the agency isn’t party to the regulation of driverless taxis, despite SF being first the test lab and now ground zero for the companies’ first major for-profit rollout.

SFMTA executive director Jeffrey Tumlin has complained about the lack of transparency and the pace of the rollout. SF city attorney David Chiu petitioned the CPUC on behalf of several city agencies on Aug. 16 to pause the service expansion of Cruise and Waymo, which his office says will preserve other legal options. As of now, the CPUC has not taken further action.

Several blind speakers spoke in favor of the robotaxi service at the Aug. 10 CPUC meeting.

All this raises big questions about safety, data, regulation, and more in a fast-changing situation. Let’s dive in.

Who regulates robocars?

The federal government has tried crafting legislation to regulate these vehicles as recently as 2018, after an autonomous Uber with a supervising driver killed a pedestrian in Arizona. That effort came up empty.

Yet the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration began in 2021 requiring the companies to report collisions, in part because of several crashes involving Teslas in “full self-driving” mode, dating back to 2014.

NHTSA earlier this year also pressured Tesla to recall nearly 363,000 cars because of their potential to “infringe on local traffic laws” — that is, break speed limits and travel through intersections — in self-driving mode. (The recall was voluntary.)

Largely, though, states have taken the regulatory lead. California is considered to have the most stringent requirements in the country, with oversight divided between the DMV and the CPUC. The DMV issues permits to operate vehicles, while the CPUC regulates commercial passenger service and oversees passenger safety.

How does a company get a permit?

To get a permit from the DMV, companies must have $5 million worth of insurance. They must also employ operators trained to drive the cars, whether the vehicle has a test driver or not. The driverless car must have two-way communication for both first responders and passengers. (At a hearing days before the CPUC vote, both Waymo and Cruise suggested first responders attend sessions to “familiarize” themselves with autonomous technology — a nonstarter for police and fire officials.)

For a CPUC permit, a company has to fulfill all DMV requirements, plus provide a passenger safety plan and a detailed map where the cars will operate. The final permit requires approval by a majority of the five-member commission. The Aug. 10 vote allowed both Cruise and Waymo to charge for driverless taxi service around the clock across SF.

Both the CPUC and DMV mandate regular reports. In addition, the DMV requires notification of collisions resulting in property damage, injury or death within 10 days of the incident. Companies must also file annual reports showing how often vehicles are taken out of autonomous mode when operated by humans — which indicates malfunctions or manual intervention for safety reasons.

Waymo and Cruise cite stiff competition and rider privacy as reasons to hold back information. They’ve declined to hand over data on the dates of trips, mileage traveled, and zip codes where rides take place.

For its part, the CPUC requires quarterly reports on a company’s operations in a city, including mileage traveled, total number of passengers carried, collisions, and customer complaints.

As of now, 40 companies have California DMV permits to test vehicles with a driver, and seven can do it without a driver. As of July, only four have permits to deploy driverless cars.

What do the companies have to report to regulators?

Whether it’s to the DMV or the CPUC, the robocar companies are self-reporting. What they tell regulators, and what they say they can’t, is revealing.

The companies say stiff competition compels them to guard trade secrets; they also cite rider privacy. Both Waymo and Cruise are using this rationale to hold back information in their quarterly CPUC reports. They’ve declined to hand over data on the dates of trips, mileage traveled on each trip, and zip codes where rides take place. Instead, they’ve only provided quarterly summaries of these aggregated data to the CPUC.

Regulators and the public have to take their word that in March, for example, Cruise robotaxis traveled a total of 17,909 miles while Waymo vehicles traveled 73,795 miles total.

Without location data, not even zip codes, it’s impossible to know where the cars are getting the most use — something that could easily be supplied “without giving away confidential business information,” according to Kildare.

What Cruise and Waymo report to the DMV is more straightforward: annual mileage (broken down by month and vehicle identification number); annual disengagement incidents (when human drivers take a car out of autonomous mode and the reason for the action); and collisions with property, other vehicles, and people. Since they began offering driverless service in 2022, the companies have reported 169 crashes combined, with all but six in San Francisco, according to data through Aug. 2.

In these 169 events, the companies reported they were at fault 34 times. In 20 of the 34 “at fault” instances, the driver had switched to manual operation either just before or as the crash happened.

Hello, Waymo: A driverless car pauses in a Richmond District handicapped spot as it attempts a three-point turn. (Photo: Alex Lash)

One complaint from officials like Tumlin is the lack of access to the companies’ safety data. What’s made public is, like the information to the state, self-reported.

For instance, Cruise wrote in an April 28 blog post how its driverless fleet outperformed human drivers “by a wide margin,” using a study it completed with the University of Michigan and Virginia Tech University. One of the Michigan researchers told The Frisc they were asked to analyze data from the ride-hailing service Maven when it operated in San Francisco. General Motors — the majority stakeholder in Cruise — owned Maven. GM, which paid for the study, would not release Cruise data to the researchers.

Safety advocate Kildare has also asked for the data, to no avail. He noted that the study was based on public observations — gathered on public streets — yet GM won’t make it public.

When The Frisc asked Cruise for the study data, a company spokeswoman replied, “We are working to provide additional information on the study in the near future.”

What about ‘bricking’?

Perhaps the biggest hole in all this self-reported information is the number of times Cruise and Waymo cars interfere with the flow of traffic, with first responders, or get into other sticky situations — like driving into wet cement — that don’t fit into the “collision” category.

One example is the pod of Cruises that froze and gummed up North Beach the day after the CPUC approved 24/7 robotaxi service. (Cruise first blamed the “bricking” on Wi-Fi interference from Outside Lands, then said, no, a meddling pedestrian did it.)

With no official regulatory channel to work from, SFMTA has decided to piece together its own data via 911 calls, first responder reports, SFMTA staff, social media, and media reporting. Those reports tell a different story: Nearly 600 incidents have been reported since driverless service began in 2022, with Cruise being the major culprit. The subset of these incidents collected by the SF Fire Department were first reported by Mission Local.

SFMTA spokesperson Stephen Chun cautioned that the agency is not the official source and the tally is “by no means 100 percent accurate.”

SFMTA has tallied nearly 600 incidents involving driverless cars since 2022. A spokesperson cautioned that the count is pieced together from outside sources, not the companies themselves, and “is by no means 100% accurate.” (Courtesy SFMTA)

Three days prior to their vote to let Cruise and Waymo go 24/7, CPUC commissioners heard SFFD chief Jeanine Nicholson warn about robocars blocking streets and driving into emergency operations.

These accounts weren’t enough to sway the vote. But soon after, a Cruise vehicle got stuck in cement and another crashed into a fire truck with flashing lights heading to an emergency. That’s when the DMV stepped in with its request that Cruise cut its SF fleet by 50 percent.

Waymo, though, can drive on with unfettered expansion, and almost certainly will, unless it gets itself into a lot of hot water (or moist concrete), or the CPUC grants San Francisco’s legal request to reconsider its green light.

Staff writer Kristi Coale covers streets, transit and more for The Frisc.

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