Last week a self-driving car stopped in the in the middle of a busy street during the morning rush hour in San Francisco, congestion for traffic almost two miles. The car, operated by Waymo, only left the intersection when the company’s technicians arrived about 10 minutes later and manually drove it away.
With services in San Francisco and Phoenix, Waymo, the self-driving car company owned by Google’s parent Alphabet, is one of two companies operating so-called driverless robotaxis. The other, Cruise, a subsidiary of General Motors, offers a service in San Francisco.
The services are the result of more than 10 years of research, development and testing by the two companies. Having poured billions of dollars into the technology, both say they will soon be rolling out driverless services in other cities as well. However, with automated vehicles still struggling to self-drive in certain situations, some local officials doubt the services are ready for widespread deployment.
The day before the Waymo car messed up traffic, the city of San Francisco sent letters to the California State Regulatory Agency questions that it slows the expansion of services until officials gain a better understanding of 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 have applied for permission from the California Public Utilities Commission to charge for driverless rides around 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 evening rush hours.
“If the commission approves comprehensive permits for both Waymo and Cruise, the hazards and network impacts caused by planned and unplanned AV stops disrupting traffic could soon affect a large percentage of all travelers in San Francisco,” it said it in one of the letters called.
Both Cruise and Waymo said the letters are an expected part of their efforts to expand services in the city. “We have long valued 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 it said in its letters. “We welcome any safety suggestions,” said a Cruise spokesman, Aaron McLear.
The letters were the latest in back-and-forth discussions between the companies, San Francisco officials and regulators.
Last year, Cruise began offering paid rides in driverless cars in certain parts of San Francisco between 10 p.m. and 5:30 a.m., and Waymo is now offering unpaid rides without a driver. However, both companies still need regulatory approval before expanding driverless commercial services throughout San Francisco. Waymo began offering paid rides in downtown Phoenix at the end of the year.
In August, Cruise applied to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the top federal agency, to authorize extensive testing of a new version of its self-driving car called Origin that doesn’t include a driver’s seat or steering wheel. But San Francisco officials have also expressed concern about the plan.
The plan, which could put as many as 5,000 of the new vehicles on the road within two years, makes Cruise’s past troubles “far more consequential,” the city said. If the company doesn’t significantly improve the performance of its technologies, it could “quickly deplete emergency response resources and erode public confidence in all automated driving technologies.”
The autonomous cars can observe pedestrians, change lanes and turn right. But they can struggle to deal with more complicated or unusual situations, like unprotected left turns and broken traffic lights, which engineers call “borderline cases” because they don’t occur as frequently as other scenarios.
“Sometimes these cars just need a human to help them out of a sticky situation,” said Phil Koopman, an engineering professor at Carnegie Mellon University who specializes in autonomous vehicles.
Waymo has been operating a driverless service in suburban Arizona since late 2020. But this is very different than in a congested city.
“When you’re obstructed on a quiet suburban street, you’re not getting in anyone’s way,” said Matt Wansley, a professor at New York’s Cardozo School of Law who specializes in emerging automotive technologies. “When you’re in town, it’s a big deal.”
The Waymo car blocking traffic in San Francisco last week entered a very complex and busy intersection “due to temporary road closures that precluded use of the intended route,” Waymo said.
If a car cannot handle a situation on its own, remote technicians can send the car additional information that can help it get going again. And if that doesn’t work, the company has to send a crew to salvage the car.
At the end of June, Cruise caused a similar traffic jam in San Francisco. The company was having trouble communicating with many of the cars in its fleet, and when they stalled in an area of the city, all lined up, they blocked traffic until technicians arrived and got them moving again.
In September, five stuck Cruise vehicles blocked the city bus’s path, delaying its 45 drivers by at least 13 minutes. His cars have also hampered firefighting efforts in the city, according to San Francisco officials’ letter. A car obstructed a fire engine on the way to a fire. Firefighters smashed the window of another car to prevent it from running over their fire hoses.
Cruise cars have not caused any 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 worries that the vehicles could “lock vehicle occupants in unsafe places such as lanes or intersections and become an unexpected obstacle for other road users.”
Cruise has said repeatedly that it is working to avoid problems. However, an independent review of the software systems that manage Cruise’s fleet found that those software systems were not suited to the type of widespread services Cruise hopes to operate.
That review, 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 fix problems on their own.
“Core fleet systems have significant challenges in terms of stability, responsiveness and scale, which are now posing fundamental problems for the company,” the review reads.
The review, conducted by IBM consultants, found that the systems, which were designed as a means of managing a small fleet of vehicles with security drivers, were not appropriate for a large fleet where the drivers had been removed.
“Further scaling with the current platform will potentially exacerbate existing problems,” the review reads. “The ability to simultaneously improve and stabilize the current platform is questionable.”
A new system would require an additional investment of $10 million to $20 million and most likely won’t be completed before the end of this year, according to the review. That’s a relatively modest 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 has fixed or addressed almost every issue 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 needs to send a crew to salvage cars when they get stuck. The same applies to Waymo, said a company spokeswoman, Julia Ilina. Companies also have to send technicians when cars break down in more traditional ways, such as B. in the event of a flat tire or a traffic accident.
Because of these limitations—and the hundreds of millions of dollars that companies invest in research and development—it’s unclear how services will become profitable businesses.
“The question is: Does this make economic sense?” said Dr. Koopman by Carnegie Mellon. “They take the drivers out of the front of the car. But when they have that many people in a building waiting for the cars to break down, they haven’t really solved anything.”
