- Police in San Francisco pulled over a self-driving taxi for not having its headlights on.
- The funny encounter was caught on video.
- Cruise, which is piloting a driverless taxi service, said its vehicle acted appropriately.
The idea that masses of autonomous vehicles could someday shuttle passengers through city streets and down US highways raises some big questions: Will a computer ever be able to match the safety and intuition of a human driver? Will we need to rethink how streets are designed? Does society need this technology in the first place?
Then there are all the nitty gritty details that need ironing out. For instance: what happens when a driverless car gets pulled over?
An incident earlier this month involving the San Francisco Police Department and a driverless taxi from the startup Cruise sheds some light on that particular question. Fortunately, someone captured the awkward and somewhat hilarious moment on video and posted it to Instagram.
Cruise, a subsidiary of General Motors, began piloting a driverless taxi service in San Francisco in February. Users can request rides through an app between the hours of 10 pm and 6 am.
In the video, the Cruise vehicle pulls over to the side of the road, allowing a police officer to get out of his car, walk over to the driver’s side, and try opening the door. “Ain’t nobody in it!” one bystander yells.
Then, the Chevrolet Bolt, equipped with a bulky array of sensors on its roof, abruptly pulls forward through an intersection before coming to a stop again, this time with its hazard lights on. “Are you serious? How does that happen?” another person says. Three police offers get out of their vehicle and peer inside the Cruise taxi as onlookers laugh at the situation.
A Cruise spokesperson told Insider that the vehicle was pulled over on April 1 for not having its headlights on. This is precisely how Cruise vehicles are programmed to behave, the company said in Twitter posts.
“Our AV yielded to the police vehicle, then pulled over to the nearest safe location for the traffic stop, as intended. An officer contacted Cruise personnel and no citation was issued,” Cruise said. The company said it has a dedicated phone line for the San Francisco Police Department to call in situations like this.
The San Francisco Police Department did not immediately return a request for comment about the incident.
The question of what happens — and whom to blame — when an autonomous vehicle breaks the law or gets into a crash isn’t a new one. In 2018, a pedestrian was killed by one of Uber’s autonomous vehicles, which was undergoing testing. The back-up driver in that crash was charged with negligent homicide.
