Supporters say that self-driving vehicles promise a future of less crowding and pollution, fewer accidents caused by human error, and better mobility for people with disabilities.
But every now and then, a car gets in trouble in a way that casts a bit of doubt on that bold vision.
So it was a Tuesday in San Francisco, where a self-driving car somehow drove into a city paving project and got stuck in wet concrete.
Paul Harvey, 74, a retired contractor who lives in the city’s Western Addition neighborhood, snapped a photo of a car with roof-mounted sensors, tilted slightly forward, its front wheels sunk into freshly poured concrete.
“I thought it was funny,” Mr. Harvey said in an interview on Wednesday. “I was kind of pleased because it showed how scary and weird the whole thing was to me.”
accident previously Reported by SFgate.comIt happened just days after California regulators agreed to expand driverless taxi services in San Francisco, despite safety concerns of local officials and community activists.
In a 3-to-1 vote last week, the California Public Utilities Commission, which regulates self-driving cars in the state, gave Cruise and Waymo permission to offer paid rides at any time during the day, throughout the city.
Cruise, a subsidiary of General Motors, has been providing taxi service in a third of the city while Waymo, owned by Google parent Alphabet, has been offering free rides to passengers.
City officials said Tuesday’s accident involving the Cruise vehicle said it was not clear how the concrete ended up.
Rachel Gordon, a spokeswoman for the San Francisco Department of Public Works, said the paving project on Golden Gate Boulevard has been marked with construction cones and that there are workers with flags at each end of the block.
“That part of the road has to be repaved, at Cruise’s expense,” said Ms. Gordon. “Fortunately, no one was injured.”
Ms. Gordon said city officials were “expressing concerns” about the vehicles, which drove on fire hoses or “just stopped in the middle of the road.” She said the city was willing to work with the companies but “there’s still a lot of work to do, we think.”
Cruise spokesperson Drew Pusateri confirmed that one of the company’s self-driving vehicles “entered a construction zone and got stuck in wet concrete.”
Mr Pusatiri said the company had “recovered” the car, although it was not clear if it was able to get out of the concrete or if it had to be towed. He said the company is in contact with city officials about the incident.
Driverless cars have become a common sight in San Francisco, a tech hub where they are often seen in test drives, collecting data that is used to improve its autonomous technology.
Although self-driving cars have not been blamed for any serious injuries or accidents in San Francisco, they have been involved in many contradictory incidents.
On Friday night, as many as 10 driverless cruise vehicles stalled near a music festival in San Francisco’s North Beach, causing traffic to pick up, according to the California State Bank. San Francisco Chronicle. Cruz said in a statement Thursday that it successfully transported thousands of concert-goers this weekend but that “limited bandwidth issues” made it difficult for the company’s remote advisors to maneuver many of its vehicles through traffic.
In January, Cruz’s vehicle entered an area where firefighters were working and did not stop until a firefighter began “knocking on the hood of the vehicle and smashing the vehicle’s window,” according to city records. In May, a driverless Waymo intercepted a fire engine as it was returning to the station.
Self-driving car companies have vigorously defended their safety records, especially when compared to the tens of thousands of people who die in car crashes each year in the United States.
Referring to its autonomous vehicles, Cruz said in a statement statement in April, “During their first million driverless miles, our self-driving vehicles were involved in fewer collisions, were the primary contributor to fewer crashes, and were involved in fewer severe collisions with higher risk of injury than human drivers in a similar driving environment.”
It would be foolish to expect self-driving cars to work perfectly, said Paul Leonardi, a professor of technology management at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Cars, like any new machine learning-based technology, need to work in real-world conditions to improve.
“You need to experience a variety of use cases to be able to learn, and driving in wet concrete is one of those use cases,” said Professor Leonardi. “We might put this under the positive that all he did was get stuck in the concrete.”
He added that when self-driving cars encounter conditions such as cones and wet concrete, “they can learn from them and machines can know what to do better next time.”
Yuen Lu Contribute to the preparation of reports.