Seeing Silicon | Driverless cabs or robotaxis face a unique challenge on the streets of San Francisco. A traffic cone
On the wild streets of San Francisco in the United States, a dramatic human versus autonomous vehicle conflict plays out
At a hike in Rancho San Antonio preserve in California, when a fellow hiker turned out to be an engineer at robotaxi startup Cruise, I just had to pop the question: “Why does a traffic cone stop a self-driving car?”
It was a hot topic late last summer. In what I would call a daring move, the city of San Francisco had just allowed self-driving cabs or robotaxis from two companies — Cruise owned by GM and Waymo owned by Google — to ply its streets. Within two weeks of the launch, a unique anonymous rebellion made headlines. An activist group who called themselves Safe Street Rebel would sneak in front of a robotaxi, set a big orange traffic cone on its hood, and pedal off on their bikes. As soon as the cone was placed on top, the vehicle’s side lights flashed orange and it would stop. This started to happen at intersections, in the middle of roads, side streets, and soon became a dinner table conversation in the tech city. The only way to unfreeze the car was for a human to remove the cone. “It’s a safety feature,” laughed the engineer I had cornered, “it’ll work even if you put a coffee cup on top of its roof.”
Autonomous vehicles, explained my fellow hiker as we panted uphill, don’t look at the world like humans. The vehicle collects billions of data points from multipronged sensors, cameras, laser-based light detectors, and radars — things like obstruction, lane markings, curbs, and other vehicles. All this data is fed real time into its onboard processor, worked upon by machine learning to trigger an appropriate — usually ultra-safe — action.
What a marvellous technology, summed up the engineer. My thrill, and I didn’t confess this to my rather enthusiastic companion, stemmed from the human ingenuity of ‘coning’ a robotaxi. Pardon the pun.
Cheeky stunts apart, I do rather like the idea of my car driving itself. Public transport in the Bay Area, where I live, is next to nil. Distances are long. The only way to go buy a bottle of milk is to take out your vehicle. Autonomous features — from emergency braking, adaptive cruise control, to the humble but useful blind spot detection — seem god-sent in a lifestyle that is relentless driving. Perhaps that’s the reason that everyone here from Tesla, to Waymo, NVIDIA to Intel, and Apple are pouring millions of dollars into this tech.
That and the projected global market growth to US$ 214.32 billion by 2032 from US$ 42.37 billion in 2022 (a CAGR of 21.9%), according to a Research and Markets forecast report.
Over dinner, friends from San Francisco told me of another human-robocar conflict they’d witnessed. At a public parade, a road was blocked and a policeman diverted oncoming vehicles to alternate roads. In comes a robotaxi. The guard signals to the car, but the car, with its multipronged signals, can’t see what the policeman’s signals are, only note his presence (dehumanising him in some ways, I exclaim). It swerves, avoids the person, swerves again, and eventually goes around the exasperated policeman into the blockaded street.
A month after San Francisco granted permission to companies to ply robocars, San Francisco’s police and fire department released a list of 55 incidents where self-driving cars had gotten in the way of rescue operations. In one of the citations, the fire department officer who faced an oncoming robotaxi heading towards a fire scene, noted with exasperation, “I yelled at the car twice to stop, banging with my fist on the hood. After warning twice, I smashed the window. The car stopped. Thank you.”
I imagine the frustration of the citation, or the mischievous glee of Safe Street Rebel, or the exasperation of the parade policeman — all emotional outcries against companies and their emerging technologies which are trying to make humans redundant and invisible.
Meanwhile in the city, the whirling romance of having a taxi without a driver as you scroll through your social media was short lived. A few months after the city allowed autonomous cabs, a car struck a pedestrian and sent her into the path of a Cruise taxi. The robotaxi initially braked but then continued to drag the woman for another 20 feet, stopping on top of her, leading to serious injuries. After this incident, the company has come under investigation and robotaxis have been banned from the streets of San Francisco. Cruise faces a lawsuit and is laying off employees, while Apple has announced a rollback of its autonomous driving technology ambitions.
However, human drivers overseeing (and guiding) autonomous vehicles remains a common site across the Bay Area roads. As I walk around the block from where I live in Mountain View, where Google’s headquartered, I notice two trucks parked next to the sidewalk — with radars jutting out from either side, like alien horns. These are owned by Kodiak, a company that’s developing autonomous driving trucks. On Reddit, some truckers are angry that this technology has been fed billions of dollars while they’ve not been given a raise over the past few years. Others counter that self-driving trucks can never back into a construction zone or park or notice a random lane closure (can they not?). The race to autonomous technology is far from over and we will continue to see more human-vehicle encounters play out on our roads.
Shweta Taneja is an author and journalist based in the Bay Area. Her fortnightly column will reflect on how emerging technology and science is reshaping society in the Silicon Valley and beyond. Find her online with @shwetawrites. The views expressed are personal.
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