(SFist) The latest self-driving car mishap comes courtesy of a cluster of GM Cruise driverless taxis that simply stopped in their tracks “for a couple of hours” Wednesday night and had to be manually pushed off the street by GM employees.
It was precisely six days into the era of General Motors’ self-driving Cruise taxis accepting paid rides that they had their first big clusterfuck. The GM Cruise self-driving taxis started giving free rides in February, but these were never intended to stay free, that was just a pilot program working at limited times in limited areas, ostensibly to work out the kinks.
Some @Cruise robotaxis appeared to be stuck in SF last night at the corner of Gough St. and Fulton St.
Human ops apparently had to rescue them. Still some kinks to iron out. pic.twitter.com/eXDocjVfHU
— Taylor Ogan (@TaylorOgan) June 30, 2022
But the kinks are clearly not worked out. On the sixth day that these robotaxis were taking fares (actually sixth night, they only run between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m.), TechCrunch reports that “more than a half dozen” of them just stopped working and blocked the street “ for a couple of hours.” TechCrunch adds that GM “employees arrived and manually moved the autonomous vehicles.”
The incident was originally described in a Reddit post, but has since been confirmed by General Motors. The Reddit post, seen above, is entitled “Bunch of Cruise cars stuck on Gough by Robin,” with Robin being a reference to the omakase sushi place in front of which this bizarre incident occurred,
“The first thing I say to my coworker is that they’re getting together to murder us,” the Reddit poster said Wednesday. “It was a pretty surreal event. Humans had to come and manually take the cars away. Cruise should get fined to shit for blocking the street off for so long. They even made it so the street sweeper couldn’t hit an entire block.”
General Motors has since copped to the fact that yes, this strange occurrence did indeed occur. “We had an issue earlier this week that caused some of our vehicles to cluster together,” a Cruise spokesperson told TechCrunch. “While it was resolved and no passengers were impacted, we apologize to anyone who was inconvenienced.”
