Funny Incident In San Francisco, Police Confused Communicating With Autonomous Taxi When Violating Traffic Rules
JAKARTA - It's been more than two months since Cruise has started allowing San Francisco residents to ride robotaxis without a driver. However, something happened to one of his cars, due to a clash with the police.
In a video originally posted to Instagram last weekend, users captured an awkward and somewhat comical interaction between the San Francisco Police Department Officer and the autonomous vehicle after it pulled over, for not turning on the lights.
After stopping the Chevy Bolt turning into a Cruise, a police officer climbed into his window, trying to open the door but to no avail. The police started walking back to his car. Autonomous vehicles begin to roll back in what looks like an image of a police chase, but then pulls over and places the danger at a more distant point on the road.
The police drove behind the vehicle once more, got out of the car, and then circled around the vehicle as they probably tried to figure out how to get the headlights back on.
As Cruise spokesman Aaron Mclear explained to The Verge, autonomous vehicles don't go away from cops. But the autonomous vehicle was trying to find a safer location to pull over. This is an action that most human drivers cannot perform. Mclear also confirmed that the SFPD ordered the autonomous vehicle to pull over for not turning on its headlights. But finally Cruise said they had fixed the problem.
"The vehicle gave up on a police car and pulled over to a nearby safe location for a traffic stop," Mclear said. “An officer contacted Cruise personnel and no ticket was issued. We work closely with the SFPD on how to interact with our vehicles and have a dedicated phone number for them to call in situations like this.”
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Cruise, a subsidiary of General Motors, uses LIDAR technology to power the self-driving capabilities of its vehicles. The company has been using cars to shuttle around its San Francisco-based employees since 2017, but recently opened a waiting list for taxis for the city's general population.
A Cruise spokesman also said they still don't know exactly what caused the Cruise vehicle to operate without its headlights. Maybe the car's automatic headlights feature is disabled or it fails to detect the darkness around it. But that's a little worrying. Cruise vehicles are only allowed to drive from 10pm to 6am, which obviously makes headlights quite important.
In 2018, a self-driving Uber vehicle hit and killed a pedestrian who was walking on his bicycle across the street in Tempe, Arizona. Subsequent investigations from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) found that Uber disabled the Volvo car's emergency braking system to prevent any interaction with Uber's self-driving software, but it's not clear if that contributed to the crash.