A drive-by shooting of a block party left nine people injured in San Francisco’s famed Mission District Friday night. While it was the human-driven car that caused the violence, a self-driving Cruise vehicle reportedly didn’t make things easier on first responders.
Video of an empty Cruise robotic taxi stalled in a street with a police officer shouting at it to move spread like wildfire on social media over the weekend. Posted by bicycle enthusiast and activist Paul Valdez, an officer can be heard shouting that the vehicle was blocking emergency medical and fire trucks from reaching the scene.
“It’s blocking emergency medical and fire. I’ve got to get it out of here now!” the police officer can be heard shouting in the video.
Cruise responded to the tweet with a thread of its own saying the vehicle didn’t actually block emergency vehicles. It reconfirmed its statement with Jalopnik Tuesday:
Even if the vehicle wasn’t completely blocking the road, that doesn’t mean that the situation wasn’t dangerous, or could be dangerous in the future.
We’ve reached out to the San Francisco Police Department for comment on the incident, and will update this post when we hear back.
This is far from the first time a confused self-driving taxi has gummed up the works in San Francisco around emergency vehicles. One officer attempted to pull over a Cruise vehicle for not having its lights on, only for it to bumble away. And it doesn’t take a suddenly closed road and flashing police lights to confuse Waymo and Cruise vehicles. Last year Cruise experienced a networking crash which stalled 60 of its vehicles where ever they happened to be driving at the time. Other cars with autonomous tech, like Teslas, also seem to have a hard time with emergency vehicles allegedly leading to fatal crashes.