Due to unusual driving errors, the United States tries to stop the advance of driverless cars

in San Francisco, United States of AmericaThey try to set a limit. Regulators don’t want the driverless vehicle fleet to grow any further and have asked transport authorities to stop issuing driving permits.

For more than a year, Cruise and Waymo have been operating driverless in the city of San Francisco. Its operation as a rental car or taxi is limited to areas and times with less traffic density. For example, Cruise can operate 30 vehicles between 10pm and 6am.

The possibility of extending the service to 24 hours a day is now on the table, but city traffic managers have asked Californian authorities not to do so, according to NBC News.

Regulators understand that companies are unwilling to offer their services securely. And even if the truth is that they have not been involved in serious accidents, Cruisers interfered with the work of firefighters during a fireThe same agents had to take control of the vehicle to ensure that the problem did not get worse.

But that wasn’t the only driving error of these self-driving cars. On September 26 last year, three driverless cruise cars were responsible stop trafficO. They had also blocked a trolley lane in San Francisco the week before.

Last April 2, in San Franciscoan officer told him to stop to a vehicle traveling at night with no headlights on. What that cop couldn’t imagine is that the car was a driverless vehicle. One of Cruise’s self-driving taxis.

Seeing that the driver was not there, the officer tried to open the door. And since he couldn’t, he went back to the patrol car. At that moment, the autonomous car sped past the intersection and flashed its hazard lights, assuming, of course, that the cop was a thief.

Without exit

In October 2021, for several consecutive days, dozens of Waymo cars were stuck in a cul-de-sac.

Cars have appeared at the end of 15th Street, which has no exit. And then they managed to turn around and walk away. The problem occurred when one of those cars came “every five minutes” which caused Gather up to 50 people at the same time.

Furthermore, the behavior of the cars has caused the formation of a queue and the generation of a traffic jam in a street where traffic is limited to improve the quality of life of the residents.

Waymo acknowledged the problem and released a statement on the matter, claiming that the cars are continually compliant with San Francisco traffic regulations and that the turn made by their taxis on 15th Avenue was due to some signs on the intersecting road shortly before the end of the avenue. “The driver obeys signals as every car should.”

On the one hand it is true that you have to respect the rules, but Waymo cars did it to the letter they went through a dead-end alley to turn around at the end.

Thus things, San Francisco authorities are demanding that tech companies make their self-driving cars smarter. Or at least someone adds some common sense to them.

“Cruise’s safety record is public and includes driving millions of miles in a highly complex urban environment with zero life-threatening injuries or deaths,” Cruise spokesman Drew Pusateri said in a statement published by NBC News.

The real challenge to overcome is the enormous amount of variables that can be produced in a city. It is why Mercedes has obtained level 3 vehicle certification for its EQS, but its driver can only ignore traffic in very specific situations. Among them: driving on a previously mapped highway below 60 km/h.

Tesla is also running into problems in the number of variables found in the streets. The solution was to put their users as beta testers but they only confirmed that total autonomous driving is still a long way off for Elon Musk’s company.

SL