Driverless car traffic jam as robotaxis shutdown & block street for HOURS | The Sun
A BUSY interchange in San Francisco was brought to a standstill after a fleet of malfunctioning driverless cars blocked traffic for hours.
The swarm of Cruise Robotaxis stalled vehicles on Gough and Fulton Streets on Tuesday night as a public trial of the new tech went terribly wrong.
Traffic was reportedly halted for two hours as company employees scrambled to the scene to fix the bungled cars.
Images shared on Reddit showed the extent of the malfunction with several driverless vehicles stationed at the entrance and exit of the junction.
It left a queue of traffic in its wake as frustrated drivers were left fuming.
“The first thing I say to my co-worker is that they’re getting together to murder us,” wrote one bemused motorist on Reddit.
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“It was a pretty surreal event. Humans had to come and manually take the cars away. Cruise should get fined for blocking the street off for so long.
"They even made it so the street sweeper couldn’t hit an entire block.”
Cruise, which is backed by General Motors, have not revealed what caused the vehicles to stop or why they suffered the same fault in the same place.
“We had an issue earlier this week that caused some of our vehicles to cluster together,” a company spokesperson said.
“While it was resolved and no passengers were impacted, we apologize to anyone who was inconvenienced.”
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According to Techcrunch, the vehicles were eventually recovered through a combination of remote assistance and manual retrieval.
No accidents were reported because of the malfunction.
The embarrassing mishap came just one week after Cruise launched its paid driverless commercial taxis service in San Francisco – seen as a world first in a major city.
Due to the company’s license, the services have been allowed to operate between 10pm and 6am with the cars restricted to particular streets.
Cruise had previously offered free rides to the public for several months before launching its paid service.
However, questions have consistently been raised about their safety and whether they break motoring laws.
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In April, cops reportedly pulled over a Cruise vehicle after it was found driving without headlights on after dark.
In a widely shared Instagram clip, officers were caught on camera looking confused after discovering the vehicle had no driver.
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