GM's Cruise so Far: A Crash, and 60 RoboTaxis 'Disabled' After Losing Server Contact

On June 2nd California approved General Motors' Cruise robotaxi service. The Drive describes an accident that happened the next day:

The autonomous car made an unprotected left turn and was hit by a Toyota Prius on June 3, though the accident wasn't reported until Wednesday. When reached for comment by The Drive, the San Francisco Police Department explained that the Cruise vehicle had three passengers, all in the backseat, while the Prius had two occupants in total.... According to the incident report Cruise filed with the California DMV, the Cruise taxi was making a green light left turn from Geary Boulevard onto Spruce Street in downtown San Francisco. It began the turn and stopped in the middle of the intersection, presumably noticing the Toyota headed for it. The Prius then hit the right rear of the Chevy Bolt.

Cruise explained that afterward, 'occupants of both vehicles received medical treatment for allegedly minor injuries.' GM's incident report points out the Prius was speeding at the time of the accident, and was in the right turn lane before heading straight and hitting the Bolt. SFPD told The Drive that 'no arrest or citation was issued at the time of the initial investigation,' which is still ongoing. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has opened up a special crash investigation into the accident, but there are no public results yet.
Wired reports:
In response to that crash, Cruise temporarily reprogrammed its vehicles to make fewer unprotected left turns, according to internal messages seen by WIRED. At an internal meeting Jeff Bleich, Cruise's chief legal officer, said the company was investigating the incident, according to a recording reviewed by WIRED. He also warned employees not working on that investigation to try and tune out crashes or related news reports, saying they were unavoidable and would increase in frequency as the company scaled up its operations. 'We just have to understand that at some point this is now going to be a part of the work that we do, and that means staying focused on the work ahead,' he said.

Wikipedia's entry for Cruise notes a few other incidents:
In April 2022, the San Francisco Police Department stopped an empty (operating without any human safety attendants) Cruise AV for driving at night without its headlights on.... Also in April 2022, an empty Cruise AV blocked the path of a San Francisco Fire Department truck responding to a fire.

But Wired also reports on a more troubling incident that happened 'around midnight' on June 28th:
Internal messages seen by WIRED show that nearly 60 vehicles were disabled across the city over a 90-minute period after they lost touch with a Cruise server. As many as 20 cars, some of them halted in crosswalks, created a jam in the city's downtown in an incident first reported by the San Francisco Examiner and detailed in photos posted to Reddit....

The June 28 outage wasn't Cruise's first. On the evening of May 18, the company lost touch with its entire fleet for 20 minutes as its cars sat stopped in the street, according to internal documentation viewed by WIRED. Company staff were unable to see where the vehicles were located or communicate with riders inside. Worst of all, the company was unable to access its system which allows remote operators to safely steer stopped vehicles to the side of the road.

A letter sent anonymously by a Cruise employee to the California Public Utilities Commission that month, which was reviewed by WIRED, alleged that the company loses contact with its driverless vehicles 'with regularity,' blocking traffic and potentially hindering emergency vehicles. The vehicles can sometimes only be recovered by tow truck, the letter said. Images and video posted on social media in May and June show Cruise vehicles stopped in San Francisco traffic lanes seemingly inexplicably, as the city's pedestrians and motorists navigate around them.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.