While self-driving cars are evolving rapidly and are transforming the major sector of the automotive industry, there have been some eyebrow-raising concerns that have caught our attention recently. It has been reported that the self-driving taxi company named “Cruise” was recently involved in an accident on the streets of San Francisco. On June 3, a reported collision occurred between one of its autonomous cars and a Toyota Prius that brought about minor injuries to the passengers sitting in both cars.
The incident has alerted the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration as it’s the continuous second incident that’s associated with the “Cruise” company. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration carried out their investigations. However, according to the reports, the incident happened just after the company was granted authorization access to start charging for its self-driving rides. This seems disturbing to the public due to its prevalent safety concerns.
However, the commercialization of the Cruise’s fleet was also being approved by the California Public Utility Commission just a day before this incident occurred. Since then, the NHTSA has been carrying out its investigations and is digging deeper into the details, but the company has allegedly denied all the reports of the investigation and stated, “The agency has not opened a formal investigation into Cruise for this or any other incident.”
Moreover, Cruise is not acknowledging the NHTSA reports and has regarded this whole procedure as a “routine” investigation by the highway traffic authorities. Not only this, the company had been conducting its self-driving rides till June, and that too without the presence of safety drivers. This has caused major concerns because Cruise was still operating the rides even before getting access to charge customers for their rides.
Coupled with this, there had been a major technical fault in the Cruise vehicles, and owing to this, they all shut down in the middle of the roads of San Francisco. San Francisco is already considered a very high-traffic city, and when these vehicles stopped working, a major traffic jam was seen in the streets of San Francisco, causing a major setback in terms of traffic regulations.
Additionally, the company “lost its contact” with all autonomous vehicles in May, and the matter was brought to the notice of the California Public Utilities Commission by an anonymous Cruise employee. He stated that the “same issue happens with regularity”. Hence, Cruise needs an immediate consideration of the operational parameters of its autonomous vehicles and is needed to prevent the matter from becoming grave.