If you’ve been following the operations of driverless cars in Northern California, you know it’s a bit of a shitshow. State officials want everyone to think that they’re the future and everything is fine, but the reality is different. From getting in the way of emergency vehicles, to stopping traffic to glitching out over traffic cones on their hood, they’re more an annoyance than useful. Now, less than a week after officials expanded their operations, SFGATE reports a robo taxi drove itself into wet cement on a construction site.
On Tuesday August 15th, Paul Harvey, a resident of San Francisco who lives in the area of operations for Cruise robotaxis, told SFGATE he spotted one of the driverless cars sitting at a construction site sitting in fresh concrete with no one inside.
“I can see five different scenarios where bad things happen and this is one of them. It thinks it’s a road and it ain’t because it ain’t got a brain and it can’t tell that it’s freshly poured concrete,” he said. Luckily he managed to snap a picture.
In a statement to SFGATE, a spokesperson for Cruise said that the robotaxi was removed from the concrete and picked up by the company. Like many people in the city, Harvey remains a robotaxi skeptic, calling them “creepy.” Worse yet, their recent operations in and around San Francisco haven’t done much to get people on the side of support for them.
This incident is the second less than a week after the California Public Utilities Commission voted to allow 24/7 service of robotaxis in the city. The weekend of August 13th, more than a few of the driverless cars were stuck and confused on streets near a music festival.
Cruise claims that the sheer number of people leaving the festival in the area caused cellular network traffic, which causes connectivity issues with the robotaxis. One of the robotaxis was stuck for 45 minutes in an intersection while ride haling cars carrying people from the festival drove around it.
