A Cruise-on-Cruise Crash Reveals the Hardest Thing About Self-Driving Tech
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. On June 11, a self-driving Cruise Chevrolet Bolt had just made a left onto San Francisco’s Bryant Street, right near the General Motors-owned company’s garage. Then, whoops: Another self-driving Cruise, this one being driven by a Cruise human employee, thumped into its rear bumper. Yes, very minor Cruise on Cruise violence.
According to a Department of Motor Vehicles report, the kind any autonomous vehicle tester must submit to the state of California after any incident, both vehicles escaped with only scuffs. “There were no injuries and the police were not called,” Cruise reported.
A single incident does not a metaphor about self-driving technology make, but Cruise has had flurries of bumping and rear-ending incidents in San Francisco, where it has tested its technology since 2016. Many of these are unserious and relatively unremarkable, the sort of thing that might happen to a human driver and that an insurance company would never hear about.
