Cruise is expanding its self-driving car operation to Los Angeles.
CNBC reports Cruise has 400 robotaxi’s and most are in San Francisco. There are over 2000 robotaxi vehicles in California.
Cruise is increasing autonomous rides by 49% per month and are doing more than 10,000 rides per week.
Cruise CEO said they were operating tens of autonomous vehicles in 2022. 400 in 2023 and they plan thousands in 2024.
Cruise and Waymo are requesting expanded operations in San Francisco despite block traffic and emergency vehicles many dozens of times.
The local NBC reporter has a recording of his second Cruise ride resulted in blocking traffic for twenty minutes.
Robotaxis on public streets are causing dozens of problems each month for firetrucks, ambulances and police cars and city traffic. California state agencies have set up the rules where city leaders cannot block autonomous vehicle regulation. San Francisco and Los Angeles are fighting the expansion of robotaxi operations.
One of the five CPUC commissioners is lawyer John Reynolds. He was appointed by Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2021. In 2021, John Reynolds served as general counsel for Cruise.
There are more than 10,000 human drivers now working for ride-hailing services such as Uber and Lyft in San Francisco.
California is expected to vote on expanding the presence of driverless cars in San Francisco but what happens if the car malfunctions? @nbcbayarea Senior Investigative Reporter @BigadShaban experienced first hand what happens when things go wrong. pic.twitter.com/5NDMrs5A3p
— Last Call (@LastCallCNBC) August 10, 2023
This experience is similar to the one we had here: https://t.co/Skhv4N5xKi
— The Kilowatts 🚗⚡️ (@klwtts) August 10, 2023
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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Tesla level 2 driver assist have killed at least 21 people, they crash into stopped firetrucks regularly. How many have Cruise killed? How many fully autonomous miles have Teslas driven? Zero,which is what Elon said Tesla is worth without autonomy.
49% per month, is that a lot?
“Driver assist”? So the driver was still doing the driving?
No.
No,the driver was inattentive, because FSD was engaged. Hence, the government investigation.
Focusing on expanding the business before completely solving these problems is putting the robotic cart before the cyber horse and shows they aren’t responsible enough to be trusted.
That is a completely unreasonable ask. You are never going to solve all of the problems before needing to expand. Actually expanding can help to solve some of these problems since the network will be collecting more data to train their machine learning models on.
This is also to be expected from any new technology, it is never perfect but constantly being worked on and improved and to ask for perfection is being unreasonable.