Overall, that’s pretty good: Cruise won’t say how many miles of testing it has under its drive belt, but 100 vehicles operate in San Francisco, and the company tests 24 hours a day. According to mandatory reports filed with the California Department of Motor Vehicles, Cruise cars have been involved in 21 incidents in 2017 alone. (Vogt declined to answer questions about how it will determine what is safe enough.)Īs a result, the cars are more likely to get hit than to be the hitters. “We will not launch until we have safety perfect,” General Motors President Dan Ammann said during Tuesday’s press event, referring to plans to put driverless cars on the road. Cruise says they’re programmed like that on purpose. Yes, these cars are more conservative than your uncle who forwards you those chain emails. No vehicles were waiting behind us, but, oh, if there had been-the honking! (Kyle Vogt, Cruise’s CEO, later told me the lidar sensors that usually determine how much clearance the vehicles have on their sides have been suffering from technical issues for the past few weeks, so the cars are even more cautious about going around obstacles then they normally are.)
#BUSTER MILES CHEVROLET USED TRUCKS DRIVER#
About two minutes later, the safety driver finally flipped off the self-driving mode and piloted the car around the bus. Chinchilla braked and considered its impending circumnavigation. There was plenty of room to navigate around it.
At one point, Chinchilla approached a public bus pulled over to the side of a one-way street. (I would not choose to ride in this self-driving car if I were, say, already suffering from a migraine.) And occasionally, they get confused and just kinda freeze. They stop at the hint of danger, sometimes slamming on the brakes and throwing passengers forward in their seats. They are slow-we stayed at about 15 to 20 miles per hour for most of our trip. But right now, they don’t always get it right.įor humans driving regular cars, these auto-matons must be a nuisance. Cruise employees later told me they’ve programmed their cars to anticipate the actions of pedestrians. Our car, meanwhile, had jerked to a stop-in the middle of the intersection.
Not the baby, I pleaded silently, before she turned to cross the perpendicular street instead. Towards the end of the ride, the car began to make a left turn into a crosswalk, and a woman pushing a stroller on the sidewalk accelerated toward the street. And Chinchilla was terribly considerate to those approaching crosswalks, braking, hard, the moment it looked like a person might cross the street. The car gave a bike rider cycling next to the curb plenty of space-we inched behind him for minutes, refusing to deviate from our lane. I felt good about the well-being of the pedestrians and cyclists around me, too.
#BUSTER MILES CHEVROLET USED TRUCKS DRIVERS#
(This is contrast with Waymo, Google’s self-driving car unit, which has taken drivers out of its test vehicles in a Phoenix suburb and plans to launch a completely driverless taxi service in a Phoenix suburb in a few months.) Today, two autonomous vehicle trainers sit in the front-one safety driver, with her feet resting on the brake pedal and her hands loosely around the wheel, and a helper in the passenger seat, who sits with laptop in lap, softly intoning directions and words of caution, sending messages to coworkers through Slack, and taking notes on the ride. If the Silicon Valley motto is “move fast and break things,” Detroit’s seems to be “move below the speed limit and ensure you don’t kill anyone.”Ĭruise’s driverless rides aren’t human-free, not yet. My trip was far from smooth, the vehicle so careful that it jolted, disconcertingly, to a stop at even the whisper of a collision. In this regard, the electric, self-driving Chevrolet Bolt seems to be doing just OK. Which means that if a car is going to drive itself, no humans drivers involved, it must get very good at doing something very hard: interpreting and anticipating the behavior of humans.
Why couldn’t they be like this autonomous vehicle: extra cautious, considerate, aware?īut this chaos-this unpremeditated waltz of oops, no, you go and nope, buster, me first-is reality. Human-operated vehicles whipped around corners and rolled through stop signs. Two cyclists made unexpected but sweeping turns. Two walkers darted out in front of the car during my roughly 20-minute, 3-mile ride, blissfully ignorant that they were trusting their lives to a piece of software. When I hitched a ride in one, a white and orange General Motors Cruise autonomous vehicle during a press event in San Francisco on Tuesday, every movement was a cause for alarm.
Nothing will make you hate humans-capricious, volatile, unplanned, erratic humans-like sitting in the back of self-driving car.
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