” companies—Google’s Waymo and GM’s Cruise. Both companies, which have been testing their automated vehicles in the Bay Area for years, were essentially given free rein to set up shop and start making money off their driverless carriages.for the autonomous transportation industry, as it’s pretty much the first time that self-driving cars have been unleashed in this way.
In short: as of last week, it really looked like both companies were ready to hit the road and never look back. But this brief moment of triumph was almost immediately cut short by an unfortunate series of events. Late Thursday night, one of Cruise’s taxisin the Tenderloin district, sending a Cruise employee to the hospital. Not long afterward, another Cruise taxi stalled out at a city intersection, causing significant traffic delays in the area. Overnight, Cruise’s successes seemed to evaporate.
The problem, from Brown’s perspective, is that roadways are actually social domains, rich with subtle interpersonal cues that tell drivers how to interact with one another and their surrounding environment. Self-driving cars, unfortunately, are not very good at picking up on those cues—and are more akin children who haven’t been socialized properly yet.“We don’t let five-year-olds drive.
This week, we talked to Jack Brewster, a senior analyst at NewsGuard, whose team recently published a