Calvin Hu was driving with his girlfriend near San Francisco's Golden Gate Park when he pulled up at an intersection behind two white and orange autonomously operated Chevrolet Bolts. He was stopped in the next lane. The cars in the city didn't move when the light turned green.
Several more Cruise vehicles had stopped in the lanes behind Hu when he was about to reverse. Three people are trapped in a sandwich.
Hu says he drove over the curbs of the street's median to escape. He went back on foot to see if the situation had been resolved. Hu says that a person who looked like they worked for the company parked in the intersection as if the street was closed to traffic. The robot car blockade lasted at least 15 minutes.
There were other cars holding up traffic in San Francisco that night. More than 60 vehicles were disabled across the city after they lost contact with a Cruise server, according to internal messages. The San Francisco Examiner reported that as many as 20 cars stopped in crosswalks and created a jam in the city's downtown. The California Department of Motor Vehicles said it was aware of the incident and would meet with Cruise to get more information.
It wasn't the first time Cruise had a problem. The company lost contact with its entire fleet for 20 minutes on the evening of May 18. The company staff couldn't see where the vehicles were or communicate with them. The company couldn't access its fallback system, which allows remote operators to steer stopped vehicles to the side of the road.
WIRED reviewed a letter sent by a Cruise employee to the California Public Utilities Commission that alleged that the company lost contact with its vehicles with regularity. Tow truck can sometimes be used to recover vehicles. In May and June of this year, images and video were posted on social media showing Cruise vehicles stopped in San Francisco traffic lanes as the city's human pedestrians and motorists navigate around them.
Tiffany Testo gave a statement that said the company's vehicles are programmed to pull over and turn on their hazard lights when they encounter a technical problem or meet road conditions they can't handle. The statement said that it is and will remain one aspect of the safety operations. Testo didn't reply to questions about when Cruise vehicles stopped in traffic.
Cruise is competing with well-capitalized rivals like Aurora, which is owned by Amazon, and Zoox, which is also owned by Amazon, in a crucial time for the company. GM bought out the SoftBank Vision Fund's stake in Cruise and invested more than one billion dollars into the self- driving unit. Two weeks after the May outage that froze Cruise's entire fleet, the CPUC approved Cruise's permit to charge money for ride-hail rides, opening a path to a full commercial service that could help the company start to recover the billions it has poured.
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