Last week, a self-driving car stopped at the middle of a busy street during the morning rush hour in San Francisco, clogging traffic during almost two miles. The car, which was operated by Waymo, did not leave the intersection until company technicians arrived about 10 minutes later and manually moved it away.
With services in San Francisco and Phoenix, Waymo, the self-driving car company owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet, is one of two companies operating so-called robotaxis without human drivers behind the wheel. The other, Cruise, a General Motors subsidiary, offers service in San Francisco.
The services are the culmination of more than 10 years of research, development and testing by the two companies. After investing billions of dollars in the technology, both say they will soon launch driverless services in other cities as well. But because automated vehicles still struggle to drive themselves in certain situations, some local officials wonder if the services are ready for widespread use.
The day before Waymo’s car hit traffic, the city of San Francisco sent letters to the California State Regulator asking slow the expansion of services until officials better understand the technology and its limitations. the letters were previously reported by NBC News.
After operating limited services in San Francisco for several months, both companies applied to the California Public Utilities Commission for permission to charge money for self-driving rides throughout the city and around the clock. But until the services are better understood, the city said it doesn’t want them to operate in downtown San Francisco or during morning or afternoon rush hours.
“If the Commission approves broad authorizations for both Waymo and Cruise, the hazards and network impacts caused by planned and unplanned AV shutdowns clogging traffic could soon affect a large percentage of all San Francisco commuters. ”, says one of the letters. saying.
Both Cruise and Waymo said these letters were an expected part of their efforts to expand services in the city. “We have long appreciated a healthy dialogue with city officials and government agencies in California,” said Katherine Barna, a Waymo spokeswoman.
The city of San Francisco declined to comment beyond what is stated in its letters. “We welcome any suggestions on safety,” said a Cruise spokesman, Aaron McLear.
The letters were the latest in back-and-forth talks between the companies, San Francisco officials and regulators.
Last year, Cruise began offering paid self-drive rides in certain parts of San Francisco between 10 pm and 5:30 am And Waymo now offers paid self-drive rides. But both companies still need regulatory approval before launching commercial driverless services throughout San Francisco. Waymo began offering paid rides in downtown Phoenix at the end of the year.
In August, Cruise asked the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the top federal regulator, to approve widespread testing of a new version of his self-driving car called Origin, which does not include a driver’s seat or steering wheel. But San Francisco officials have also raised concerns about this plan.
The plan, which could put up to 5,000 of the new vehicles on the road within two years, makes Cruise’s past woes “much more significant,” the city said. If the company does not significantly improve the performance of its technologies, it “could rapidly deplete emergency response resources and undermine public confidence in all automated driving technology.”
Autonomous cars can keep an eye on pedestrians, change lanes and turn right. But they can have a hard time dealing with more complicated or unusual situations, like unguarded left turns and broken traffic lights that engineers call “edge cases” because they don’t happen as often as other scenarios.
“Sometimes these cars just need a human to help them out of a jam,” said Phil Koopman, an engineering professor at Carnegie Mellon University who specializes in autonomous vehicles.
Waymo has operated driverless service in suburban Arizona since late 2020. But that’s very different from a congested city. “If you get disabled on a quiet suburban street, you’re not in anyone’s way,” said Matt Wansley, a professor at Cardozo Law School in New York who specializes in emerging automotive technologies. “If you’re in the city, it’s a big problem.”
The Waymo car that stopped in the middle of a San Francisco intersection last week entered a very complex and busy intersection “due to temporary road closures that prevented use of the intended route,” Waymo said.
When a car can’t handle a situation on its own, remote technicians can send the car additional information that can help it get back on track. And if that doesn’t work, the company must send a team to recover the car.
In late June, Cruise caused a similar traffic jam in San Francisco. The company had trouble communicating with many of the cars in its fleet, and when they stopped in one area of the city, all lined up in a row, they blocked traffic until technicians arrived and started them up again.
In September, five stuck Cruise vehicles blocked the path of the city bus, delaying its 45 passengers for at least 13 minutes. Their cars have also interfered with firefighting efforts in the city, according to the letter from San Francisco officials. A car blocked a fire truck on its way to a fire. Firefighters smashed the window of another car in an effort to prevent it from running over their fire hoses.
Cruise cars have not caused life-threatening injuries or deaths.
In the wake of such incidents, NHTSA, the federal regulator, recently launched an investigation into the company’s cars. The agency is concerned that the vehicles “could strand vehicle occupants in unsafe locations, such as travel lanes or intersections, and become an unexpected obstacle to other road users.”
Cruise has repeatedly said that he was working to avoid trouble. But an independent review of the software systems that manage Cruise’s fleet of cars indicated that these software systems are not suitable for the type of pervasive services that Cruise hopes to operate.
This review, which was completed last summer and recently obtained by The New York Times, examined the systems that allow the company to communicate with its vehicles and provide remote assistance when the cars can’t solve problems themselves.
“Core fleet systems have significant stability, responsiveness, and scalability challenges that now present critical issues for the business,” the review said.
Carried out by IBM consultants, the review said the systems, designed as a way to manage a small fleet of cars that included safety drivers, are not suitable for a large fleet where drivers have been removed. “Further scale with the current platform will potentially exacerbate existing problems,” the review said. “The ability to simultaneously improve the current platform while stabilizing it is in question.”
A new system would require an additional investment of $10 million to $20 million and would likely not be completed until the end of this year, according to the review. That’s a relatively small expense considering the company spent more than $860 million developing its technology in the first half of last year.
Mr. McLear, Cruise’s spokesman, said the company fixed or addressed nearly all of the issues discussed in the review. “It’s an outdated report,” he said.
Even if Cruise redesigns and rebuilds its management software, there will be times when the company has to send a team to recover cars if they get stuck. The same is true of Waymo, said a company spokeswoman, Julia Ilina. Companies must also send technicians when cars break down in more traditional ways, such as a flat tire or traffic accident.
Given these limitations, and the hundreds of millions of dollars that companies are investing in research and development, it is unclear how services will become viable businesses.
“The question is: Does this make economic sense?” said Dr. Koopman, of Carnegie Mellon. “They are taking the drivers out of the front of the car. But if you have the same number of people in a building waiting for cars to stop, you haven’t really solved anything.”