cars
Published December 16, 2023, 10:00 a.m. ET
It seemed like the ultimate tech dream.
Would you like to go out to dinner? Order a robotaxi. Side trip? Get in your Tesla, don't worry, it'll drive for you.
But now the mix of science fiction and marketing boost is colliding with reality – and some in the auto industry believe the dream will remain stuck in the garage for a long time.
Last week, virtually every Tesla on the road was recalled because of regulators' concerns that its “Autopilot” system was unsafe. This was part of a year-long investigation into Elon Musk's cars by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
Musk has been the biggest public supporter of the idea of cars doing the driving, first promising immediate “full self-driving” in 2016.
The Autopilot system allows Teslas to steer, accelerate and brake themselves, but requires a driver in the front seat. Tesla is updating the software but says the system is safe.
Panini, the cruise AV that dragged a woman under its wheels 20 feet to the curb, was inspected by police after the accident. But now the entire future of the self-driving car dream is in crisis. FOX KTVU Tesla CEO Elon Musk has pushed the driverless dream, but the promise of “fully autonomous driving” has yet to be achieved – seven years after he first achieved it. Now almost every Tesla in the US is being recalled because of the “Autopilot” mode. Portal
Tesla hasn't gone as far as others that have conducted live testing of cars on city streets with empty driver seats, including GM subsidiary Cruise; Google's Waymo unit; Volkswagen ADMT; Subaru; and over.
But a hair-raising accident on October 2 in San Francisco involving a Cruise AV called Panini – a driverless Chevy Bolt – has plunged the “autonomous vehicle” project into crisis.
It started when a woman on the city's Market Street was hit by a regular car and thrown into Panini's path, literally pinning her underneath.
Panini stopped – but unbelievably – then started again, dragging her 20 feet towards the curb at 7 mph. To free her, the firefighters had to save her entire life.
The driver of this 2018 Tesla Model S said it crashed while engaging Autopilot on the Capital Beltway around Washington, D.C. in March. via Portal The woman found underneath Panini's Cruise AV on Market St. in San Francisco had to be removed by firefighters using life-threatening fists. She survived but was seriously injured and was not named. via Portal
On its own, it might have been dismissed as a mistake.
But it was just the latest in a long line of accidents, injuries and deaths in states that have allowed driverless trials.
This year alone, self-driving cars have crashed 128 times in California; a cruise AV hit by a fire truck; another to catch a bus; a Waymo car delayed a firefighter rushing to an emergency call by seven minutes; a Cruise Origin was installed in a building in Austin, Texas and then couldn't be moved because it didn't have a steering wheel; and in San Francisco, a Waymo car killed a dog while a Cruise AV was traveling got stuck in the wet concrete.
Now, industry analysts are warning that there is no way for AV manufacturers to quickly convince the public that driverless transportation is safe.
The accident on Market St. in San Francisco started in the middle of the street, but the Cruise AV started moving and didn't stop until it hit the curb, which is what it was programmed to do – even with an injured person underneath. The KTVU Panini crash wasn't the only mishap for the cruise fleet. In August, one managed to collide with a fire truck in San Francisco. One passenger was injured and taken to hospital. KPIX
James Meigs, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and former editor-in-chief of Popular Mechanics, said Panini's crash in San Francisco shows that autonomous vehicles – “AVs” – are not yet “ready for the wild.”
“It’s like everyone’s nightmare — the robot won’t stop,” Meigs told The Post.
The problem is not that autonomous cars are objectively less safe than normal ones. They can't be impaired by alcohol and drugs — up to half of drivers in serious or fatal accidents are, according to a federal study — and they haven't caused nearly the 42,795 deaths that cars claimed in the U.S. in 2022.
A Tesla Model S in “Autopilot” mode, a driver assistance system that has been linked to 736 crashes since 2019, including 17 fatalities, according to National Highway Traffic Safety Administration data cited by The Washington Post. Portal
In fact, says Jason Stein, former editor of industry bible Automotive News and host of the podcast “Cars & Culture with Jason Stein,” they are far safer than putting a human behind the wheel.
“People may not like to hear it, but the technology that has been developed over the last decade is far better than anything humanity could ever achieve with driver training,” Stein said.
“That doesn’t mean today’s drivers still trust it, but one day we may look back and wonder why we let anyone on the road in the first place.”
The real crisis is instilling trust in technology – something Cruise appears to have failed to do.
Cruise CEO Ken Vogt (left) lost his job after the company had its operating licenses revoked in California. Oliver Cameron (right) had a full six months before that. All the cars in San Francisco were given cute names. @Cruise/X
After Panini's crash, the California DMV claimed, Cruise executives showed officers only a video of the first part of the accident, where it stopped – not the part when it started again, dragging the woman along.
The DMV suspended Cruise's licenses to operate in California on Oct. 24 and is now considering a $1.5 million fine and other sanctions.
As a result, GM parked the 950-strong cruise robotaxi fleet, which also exists in Austin and Houston. Preparatory work in Atlanta, Los Angeles, Seattle and San Diego was canceled and CEO Kyle Vogt was forced out of office in November.
Last week it laid off nine top managers and 900 workers, a quarter of its workforce.
GM CEO Mary Barra has bet big on the success of Cruise, which has converted versions of the Chevy Bolt she stands in front of into autonomous vehicles for its robotaxi fleet. Getty Images
Cruise was a mix of Silicon Valley's “move fast and break things” culture and Detroit's marketing genius: GM bought the West Coast start-up for more than $1 billion in 2016 and its CEO Mary Barra announced her first self-driving vehicle Driving through San Francisco in 2022 on “surreal.”
GM, Honda, Microsoft, Softbank and Walmart pumped in $10 billion and Cruise delivered good news – even as Panini crashed.
At 460 milliseconds, the reaction time was “faster than that of most human drivers,” it said, but then had to admit that Panini had dragged the accident victim because its human programmers had instructed him to pull over to the curb after a collision.
Professor Krzysztof Czarnecki, head of the Intelligent Systems Engineering Lab at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, told The Post that programming a car to move after colliding with a pedestrian is a fundamental mistake.
This involved another Cruise AV named Soufflé that crashed into a city bus in March, one of several accidents. @bauer/X GM had believed it would succeed in San Francisco and had previously overcome accidents on the streets of Budy City. But Panini's crash sparked a crisis that raises questions about whether robotaxis can really function safely. Getty Images
“The need to be extra careful after hitting a pedestrian – for example, considering the possibility that they are under the car – should come up in even a simple brainstorming exercise by a safety engineering team,” he said.
“Even my students pointed it out to me. Failure to do so indicates that insufficient attention has been paid to safety engineering.”
The lack of a “strong safety culture” at some automated driving companies like Cruise is the emerging industry’s main problem, Czarnecki claimed.
Uber completely abandoned its attempt at a robotaxis in 2020 after its autonomous Volvo killed a woman in Arizona in 2018, leading to damning accusations of an “inadequate safety culture” from the National Transportation Safety Board.
Uber abandoned its robotaxi experiment after a 2018 accident in Arizona. Internal cameras captured the reaction of the worker monitoring for errors when the Volvo XC90 struck a woman pushing her bicycle across a street at night. Portal This comes after Elaine Herzberg, 49, was killed by one of Uber's self-driving Volvos in Tempe, AZ. The murder ultimately led to Uber abandoning the autonomous car race entirely. Tempe Police Department
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is now investigating Cruise, not just for Panini, but also for three other incidents – one of which injured another pedestrian.
“To save itself, Cruise must radically rethink its approach to security,” Czarnecki said, adding that the company could release all of its internal data.
According to Czarnecki, unlike Cruise, Google's Waymo subsidiary has a “strong safety record,” thanks to researchers who publish automated driving data unlike other AV companies.
Undeterred by Cruise's problems, Waymo continues to offer driverless taxi rides in San Francisco, Phoenix and Los Angeles County, with Austin soon to follow.
Uber suspended its driverless program in Arizona after the fatal accident in 2018. Two years later, the company went out of business entirely after regulators accused it of serious security deficiencies. Tempe Police Department Walmart was among other investors who poured money into GM's cruise division, betting that their companies could benefit from autonomous vehicles and robotaxis. Now Cruise's experiment is on hold after Panini's crash. Source: Cruise
The company is testing operations in Buffalo, New York, to improve performance in snow — although it doesn't plan robotaxis there, spokeswoman Katherine Barna said.
Waymo's fleet of electric Jaguar I-PACEs operate on “fully autonomous technology” with 29 cameras and detailed custom maps with real-time sensor data to determine precise location.
On the roof are the “lidar” – light detection and ranging system – and the computing unit, the size of which gives an indication of the enormous computing power required to drive on city streets.
But Waymo, which launched in 2009, currently has no plans to tackle the U.S.'s toughest streets, those of New York City, Barna said.
Up to 250 Waymo AVs, converted electric Jaguars, are offering rides in San Francisco, where Google began testing driverless technology on 100-mile routes in 2009 using Toyota Prius models. Source: Waymo This is what passengers see from the back of a Waymo Jaguar I-PACE. Since May, the company has also been operating in the greater Phoenix area and Scottsdale, Arizona, a 180-square-mile zone that represents the largest robotaxi service area in the world.
Experts said machines' ability to safely respond to countless variables on crowded streets is improving exponentially, thanks in part to advances in artificial intelligence.
But pedestrians running into crosswalks, abrupt traffic changes or even wayward animals pose unique hurdles for programmers, said Jonathan Hill, dean of Pace University's Seidenberg School of Computer Science and Information Systems.
“You know, there are millions and millions of exceptions – and that's going to be really difficult to test,” Hill said. “After a decade of testing these vehicles, there are still problems. They’re still cars, they’re not perfect machines.”
Hill predicted that the growing power of artificial intelligence will mean relatively accident-free self-driving cars will be available in some U.S. cities within 12 to 18 months, but warned that the industry lacks trust among the people who use them want to use.
Cruise AVs are now permanently parked in San Francisco while CEO Kyle Vogt is out following the Panini crash. Portal
“It is one thing for science to be up to the task, but human acceptance is another,” Hill said.
The problem that most concerns the self-driving car movement is how to get Americans to believe in them — even though the idea itself is fundamentally un-American, Stein said.
“What happens with autonomous vehicles is that you hand over the freedom or the decision-making ability to something else that you don’t fully trust yet,” Stein told The Post.
“And it’s not on your terms; It depends on the conditions of the microchip in the vehicle. I think that goes against American philosophy and American freedom.
“Americans want to control freedom on their own terms.”
Filed under cars, Elon Musk, General Motors, Google, Mary Barra, San Francisco, self-driving vehicles, Tesla, transportation, Uber, 12/16/23
Load More…
{{#isDisplay}} {{/isDisplay}}{{#isAniviewVideo}} {{/isAniviewVideo}}{{#isSRVideo}} {{/isSRVideo}}
https://nypost.com/2023/12/16/lifestyle/tesla-recall-robotaxi-crash-cause-self-driving-car-crisis/?utm_source=url_sitebuttons&utm_medium=site%20buttons&utm_campaign=site%20buttons
Copy the URL to share