Lower than a day after certainly one of its driverless taxis collided with a hearth truck in a San Francisco intersection, Cruise agreed on Friday to a request from state regulators to chop in half the variety of autos it was working within the metropolis.
The setback for the driverless automotive firm got here only a week after the California Public Utilities Fee voted to permit the enlargement of driverless taxi providers from Cruise, which is owned by Basic Motors, and its rival Waymo, which is owned by the Google mother or father firm Alphabet.
On Friday, the California Division of Motor Autos, which regulates the protection of the driverless vehicles, requested Cruise to half the variety of autos it was working in San Francisco. The Cruise automobile’s collision with a hearth truck the day earlier than had injured a passenger within the driverless automotive. Earlier within the week, one other Cruise automobile acquired caught in newly poured concrete on one other metropolis avenue.
Cruise didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark.
The corporate, which now has 400 autos working in San Francisco, could have not more than 50 driverless vehicles working throughout the day and 150 at evening.
Final weekend, about 10 Cruise autos stopped functioning in the course of a busy avenue in San Francisco’s North Seaside neighborhood, blocking site visitors for quarter-hour. Drew Pusateri, a spokesman for Cruise, stated in an announcement that the vehicles had problem connecting to the Cruise staff who may need guided them out of the way in which due to a spike in mobile site visitors attributable to a music pageant within the metropolis’s Golden Gate Park about 4 miles away.
A number of different Cruise autos additionally stalled in streets close to the park.
One week in the past, the C.P.U.C. allowed each firms to cost for rides across the clock anyplace in San Francisco. The C.P.U.C. and the D.M.V. are the 2 companies governing autonomous autos in California. An organization has to acquire a allow from the D.M.V. earlier than it applies for driverless deployment permits — the type that Cruise and Waymo obtained final week — from the utilities fee.
The motor autos authority stated in an announcement that it’s “investigating current regarding incidents involving Cruise autos in San Francisco.” The company requested Cruise to chop the variety of autos working in San Francisco “till the investigation is full and Cruise takes acceptable corrective actions to enhance highway security.”
“The DMV reserves the appropriate, following investigation of the information, to droop or revoke testing and/or deployment permits if there may be decided to be an unreasonable danger to public security,” the company stated in its assertion.
San Francisco officers have complained since January that autonomous autos have been interfering with emergency autos. Earlier than this week, officers documented 55 incidents the place a driverless automotive abruptly stopped or interfered with emergency autos, together with one occasion with firefighters who had been battling a home hearth.
On Wednesday, metropolis officers filed an injunction asking the C.P.U.C. to briefly halt the driverless taxi enlargement. Neither firm has detailed how they plan so as to add to their driverless taxi providers.