Robotaxis operated by GM autonomous vehicle subsidiary Cruise created a traffic jam in the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco, California on August 11th starting at about 11 PM Pacific time, simultaneous with the Outside Lands Music Festival taking place in Golden Gate Park.
A minimum of ten and possibly as many as twelve Cruise AV robotaxis halted in an intersection, creating a traffic stoppage that snarled human-driven vehicles in a jam encompassing parts of Columbus Avenue, Grant Avenue, and Vallejo Street, as NBC Bay Area reported:
The Cruise AV vehicles either stopped or maneuvered within a limited area, apparently attempting to disentangle themselves from the traffic jam they had created. Passersby and traffic officials noted the vehicles causing the jam were all driverless, with Frisco Live 415 on X (formerly Twitter) noting “self-driving operations had a complete meltdown earlier in North Beach.”
While the Cruise robotaxi traffic obstacle was four miles distant from Golden Gate Park where the Outside Lands Music Festival – an extravaganza of music, food, liquor, and marijuana – was under way, Cruise identified the festival as the source of wireless interference that scrambled the ability of the Cruise AVs to navigate.
Cruise stated in an X post, “A large festival posed wireless bandwidth constraints causing delayed connectivity to our vehicles.” GM’s autonomous vehicle subsidiary said it is “actively investigating and working on solutions to prevent this from happening again” and issued an apology “to those who were impacted.”
The festival-induced traffic jam came just one day after the California Public Utilities Commission voted to allow Cruise and Waymo robotaxi service to operate throughout San Francisco 24/7, over the objections of many residents and even city administrators. Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt hailed the decision as “a signal to the country that [California] prioritizes progress over our tragic status quo.”
Following the Friday night Cruise AV traffic jam, the city’s president of the Board of Supervisors, Aaron Peskin, reiterated a familiar statement that Cruise autonomous vehicles are unready for “prime time.” He said “these are amazing devices, but they’re still rough around the edges, and they should not be expanded until the technology has been worked out.”
Peskin described the fact that disruptions to cell service caused a major traffic jam as “scary as heck.” He noted that natural disasters and other disruptions could knock out cell service entirely and with it the ability of Cruise AVs to navigate or act. He addressed the governor, saying action needs to be taken on the AVs “before somebody gets killed.”
Meanwhile, Cruise continues to expand its AV network aggressively. Testing of its AVs in Atlanta, Georgia was recently announced, marking the eighth city across the U.S. to host the modified, driverless Chevy Bolt EV crossovers.
Mid-August also saw Cruise AV robotaxis achieve the milestone of 4 million driverless miles traveled, with CEO Kyle Vogt saying the company’s autonomous vehicles are “now driving at a pace exceeding 1 million driverless miles per month.”
Subscribe to GM Authority for more GM Cruise news, GM AV news, GM business news, and around-the-clock GM news coverage.
Comments
“Zero Emissions” is another Barra/EV-fan-boy LIE ! Better add number of created traffic jams to that statistic. Unreliable when bandwidth is used up in crowded large Cities which is where they are being tested/used. Fortunately for the safety of the occupants the things came to a standstill.
Why don’t you try deleting that first sentence? The rest of your response is quite reasonable.
Where do you think all that electricity it takes to re-charge your battery-powered EV crap comes from? Are you really that ignorant ?
Again, these nuisance menaces should be outlawed on public roads.
Last year, 37 people were killed on San Francisco streets, with many of those deaths occurring in and around the Tenderloin and the Mission. The second most deadly year was 2016, with 32 road deaths.
Zero traffic deaths from Cruise.
San Francisco leaders have bigger fish to fry than overly concerning themselves with whether Cruise leaders are working to make Cruise as safe as possible.
It was a traffic jam. It was an inconvenience as Cruise works to develop mobility safety.
So what happens when a Cruise does kill someone? It’s going to happen, and you know it.
Hopefully they will be sued to no end, but something tells me for the greater good they will be granted immunity or not be liable, kind of like how all the pharma companies can’t be sued for all the ill effects and deaths caused by the covid vaccine, sorry i mean covid shot.
Some people don’t have common sense. After all if the company that is pushing this crap on the public says it’s safe and nobody will die we have to believe them, right?
I’m sure that if there was an emergency and you had to be someplace ASAP- and one of these drones blocked the way- you would look at it more than just an “inconvenience”
A number of emergency vehicles HAVE been blocked by cruise cars. Do we know if anyone died as a result? I still say the firetruck/ambulance is bigger than these things. Shove them out of the way, or in the case of the firetruck crush over them. After a few of these things have been smashed maybe then cruise will fix the issue. I mean with a human driving, worst case you drag the person out of the car and have the human fireman drive the blocking vehicle out of the way. With these AV’s there is no controls for a human to move it.
What better city for autonomous drama than San Francisco. It seems so right .
Autonomous. Independent. Self-governing. No need for outside control.
“AV’s failed to operate properly because they couldn’t connect to services the that control the vehicle”
I don’t believe Cruise understands what autonomous is. If Cruise’s vehicles were autonomous, everything needed to drive the vehicles would be onboard the vehicles with no need for any external sources of management and control.
And government organizations are supposed to do what we the people tell them to do. Residents and City Administrators said “NO” to the expansion. The governing body saying “YES” regardless is BS.
This should be an easy problem to solve, simply fine the brakes off of the cruise program every time this happens, huge fines. Then they will fix the problems, also if any life is lost due to one of these traffic jams when police, fire or ambulances can’t get thru the families should be able to sue the brakes off the cruise program, money talks and will motivate cruise to get things rite or face financial failure.