Hey there, it’s Fortune tech editor Alexei Oreskovic filling in for David today.
The timing couldn't have been more poetic.
On Thursday, the California Public Utilities Commission voted to give GM's Cruise and Alphabet's Waymo carte blanche to set their driverless cars loose on the streets of San Francisco, ferrying paying passengers around town just like any other taxi or ride-hailing service.
In what the Verge described as a contentious six-and-a-half-hour hearing last week, supporters and critics of the plan argued about the supposed benefits or dangers of the move. In the end, the robots prevailed, with CPUC commissioners voting 3-to-1 in favor of the resolution. (It's worth noting that one of the three commissioners who voted in favor, John Reynolds, served as managing counsel at Cruise until January 2022. According to the Verge, Reynolds decided there had been a sufficient "passage of time" to allow him to vote.)
While driverless cars have been a feature in San Francisco for years, until now they've operated as tests, with various rules limiting where and when they operate, and who can ride in them.
And the first weekend of driverless car freedom was a doozy.
By Saturday, the cars were everywhere. I personally encountered more than a dozen Cruise cars, all without drivers in the front seat, within a span of five minutes while I was on a short jaunt in my part of town.
On Friday morning, residents read a ribald tale in the San Francisco Standard about thrillseekers apparently using the driverless cars to rev up their sex lives. The story quoted a libidinous fellow named "Alex" who claims to have performed his coitus in motu no fewer than three times in autonomous cars (oddly, for reasons unexplained, Alex only chooses Cruise cars for his trysts, never Waymo).
As these robotaxis become a common part of the city's transportation fabric, San Francisco residents may wonder, not unreasonably, what kind of steps the companies have taken to ensure that their chaperone-free vehicles don't expose unwary passengers to leftover liquids, fumes, or other matter—though anyone who's waited for a train at a BART station is probably accustomed to such hazards.
But things got really jammed up in North Beach as well as near Golden Gate Park, where the Outside Lands music festival was in full force over the weekend. About ten Cruise cars were "paralyzed" on two narrow streets in North Beach on Friday night according to videos and news reports. Several miles away, near the music festival, several stalled autonomous cars snarled traffic, causing disruptions for those trying to leave the concert. According to the Standard, a police officer was able to take control of one of the stalled Cruise cars and drive it out of the way but was unable to get control of the other autonomous cars. Ultimately the street had to be closed.
Cruise told the Standard that the "large festival posed wireless bandwidth constraints causing delayed connectivity to our vehicles. We are actively investigating and working on solutions to prevent this from happening again."
The big promise of autonomous cars is to reduce the traffic accidents that caused 43,000 deaths in the U.S. last year. It's a worthy effort. But this weekend's robotaxi meltdown and the seemingly tainted CPUC vote that enabled it, underscore the need to proceed with caution. No drivers in cars should not mean no supervision.
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Alexei Oreskovic
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