Roughly 20 autonomous taxis operated by Common Motors’ Cruise enterprise unit prompted a site visitors jam on San Gabriel Road in Austin, Texas final weekend, prompting residents to vent out on social media.
Photos and movies posted on X (previously Twitter) present a small fleet of driverless Chevrolet Bolt EVs advancing at tortoise speeds with their hazard lights on, with a few of them having managed to show round and face one another by some means, in what seems to be like a slow-motion four-wheeled robotic faceoff.
In an announcement despatched to The Drive, a Cruise spokesperson hinted that prime ranges of pedestrian and car site visitors have been the reason for the robotaxis going haywire, however footage shot on the scene exhibits few folks have been really across the automobiles.
“Foot and car site visitors on the road was heavy,” stated a Cruise spokesperson for The Drive. “Our automobiles are designed firstly to prioritize security—and that features utilizing warning round pedestrians.”
All Cruise AVs are remotely monitored and the automobiles that have been concerned on this newest incident ultimately left the world on their very own, in response to the spokesperson, who added that the corporate was alerted to a crowding occasion on Austin’s San Gabriel Road on Sunday and that technicians have been capable of tackle the difficulty.
One one that was on the scene and shot a number of images and movies stated that Cruise employees have been making an attempt to function the Bolt EVs by way of distant management.
This isn’t the primary time GM’s robotaxi enterprise stepped on the nerves of residents within the cities it operates, with a number of incidents documented in San Francisco, the newest of which – involving a hearth truck – led to the corporate decreasing its fleet by 50 p.c. Different notable mishaps embrace automobiles getting caught in moist concrete, colliding with a semi-truck that was making a flip, getting tangled in warning tape, and rear-ending a municipal bus.
Relatively mockingly, Cruise ran a full-page commercial within the New York Instances in July the place it stated that “People are horrible drivers,” including that 42,795 Individuals have been killed in automobile crashes final 12 months. Unsurprisingly, this didn’t bode nicely with a former head of the Nationwide Freeway Visitors Security Administration, who stated that it’s unscrupulous to make use of the ache and struggling of individuals to advertise a enterprise.