This Was The Dire State Of Self-Driving Cars In 2023

Either the world is not ready for self-driving cars, or self-driving cars are not ready for the world. After all the avoidable crashes and injuries in 2023 — some of which were fatal — I'm going to say that it's the latter rather than the former. Autonomous vehicles are clearly not ready for use on public roads where other motorists and pedestrians present frequent and unique problems that AVs have shown they are unequipped to solve.

Self-driving cars, be they robotaxis from Waymo or Cruise, or personal vehicles fitted with such systems as Tesla's Autopilot, have turned out to be woefully unprepared for the real world where nothing conforms to fixed parameters.

Yes, computers are smart. But self-driving vehicles prove how remarkably dumb computers can be; they are repositories of information that are good at indexing but suck at contextualizing. The poor things are unable to synthesize disparate data, which is how humans can differentiate between a kid and a traffic cone.

In other words, computers and the self-driving tech they've yielded can't see the forest for the trees. All of that aside, I've never understood the appeal of a self-driving car. I love to drive. I want to drive. If I didn't, I wouldn't be in a car at all. Different strokes, I suppose. Even if you are in favor of self-driving cars, the following reports of all the accidents and regulatory woes AVs were involved in throughout 2023 ought to give you pause.

Despite its name, Tesla's so-called "Full Self-Driving" software doesn't actually make Teslas capable of fully driving themselves. If that sounds like false advertising to you, you're not the only one. And yet, Tesla is still allowed to use that term and recently decided that anyone with $15,000 to burn would be allowed access to the software. But as dangerous as it can be to use in perfect driving conditions, a new video shows how incredibly dangerous it can be to use in the snow.

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San Francisco has just about had it with Cruise autonomous cars clogging up intersections, driving on sidewalks and even escaping arrest, or whatever it is the police do to a robotaxi that has become ungovernable. Last week, the city wrote the statehouse requesting that officials intervene with the rollout of General Motors' driverless service, as well as Alphabet's Waymo. Two damning letters took aim at everything from the companies' push for blanket, city-wide, 24/7 approval, to their insistence on confidentiality when issues do arise.

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If you ask some people, electric cars that can drive themselves around town will be the savior of the world. They'll cut out traffic accidents because there's no way an autonomous vehicle could ever go rogue, and their electric motors will dramatically cut emissions from our journeys. But, it turns out there are a whole load of ways in which the self-driving part of these miracle vehicles could actually be awful for the planet.

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As companies race to build self-driving cars, there's always a question: How safe is safe enough? After all, humans drivers still crash every day — surely a system that crashes less is better than your average FaceTiming motorist, even if it's not "perfect." Just how good does an autonomous car have to be, in order to beat us fleshy human drivers at the safety game? A lot better than you'd expect, is the answer.

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Investigators at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration believe a Tesla EV that crashed into a firetruck in California was operating on Autopilot. If NHTSA investigators find that the Tesla was, indeed, driving under the EV's automated driving systems, this would mark the latest in a series of collisions involving Teslas on Autopilot and stationary emergency vehicles, according to the Associated Press.

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Proponents of autonomous vehicles keep telling us they're the future of transport — safer than human drivers, more reliable, and a solution to all the time we waste stuck in traffic. But before they can become a silver bullet to all our transport woes, they're going to have to get used to that other menace on the road: human drivers.

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San Francisco is known for its fog. The thick, low-hanging water vapor can make visibility tricky, especially behind the wheel. Now, it seems that driverless vehicles are running into the same problem — with five cars from Waymo's fleet waylaid by heavy fog Tuesday morning.

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Tesla has reportedly told U.S. regulators that a fatal crash involving a Model S earlier this year involved its automated driver-assist systems. According to Bloomberg, that's the 17th fatal Tesla crash while the systems were engaged since June 2021. The number would likely be higher, save for the fact that the government didn't require automakers to submit data on these accidents until then.

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Autonomous vehicles aren't that great. And yet we keep trying, mainly because there is a lot of money behind it. In the Bay Area, this has led to some predictable consequences, as news outlet Mission Local reports that San Francisco police and first responders are dealing with glitchy driverless cars that are in the way during emergencies or cause traffic issues. Incident reports show it happens quite a bit.

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The past few years have been an interesting time for the intersection of cars, robotics, and AI. It seems every company that built its brand on any of the three has been trying to develop that perfect merger—an autonomous, self-controlled car. Yet here we are, in 2023, without a single competent entrant on the market. Now, even the money is drying up, leaving only the diehards left.

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In 2022, the California Public Utilities Commission officially approved the use of autonomous vehicles from Cruise and Waymo to be used on the roads of San Francisco; the companies received the go-ahead to publicly beta test, more or less. And while that approval was considered a game changer at the time, a year later things aren't looking as bright. SFGATE reports that the driverless cars training in the city and surrounding areas of San Francisco are proving to be more of a problem than anyone expected.

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Self-driving cars are facing something of an uphill battle today. They need to prove to regulators that they are safe enough to hit the highway and they need to demonstrate to motorists that they are the future they actually need. One thing that probably won't help either mission is an incident that saw a Waymo self-driving car hit and kill a dog on the streets of San Francisco.

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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.

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Despite the objections of city leaders and a good portion of commuters, San Francisco has become ground zero for driverless taxi deployment and field testing. On Sunday, San Francisco also had a Pride Parade and the Giants played some baseball, which happens almost every day. Two Waymo robotaxis didn't seem to know how to manage the resulting traffic and responded by stopping dead in the middle of intersections.

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No matter how frustrating or dangerous self-driving taxis continue to be, companies are currently expanding their use in cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Vegas. Police, meanwhile, are taking advantage of the self-driving taxi proliferation to investigate crimes and possibly violate your privacy.

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What seemed like a simple trip turned into an odyssey of false starts and dodgy behavior after one San Francisco journalist attempted to take a Waymo self-driving taxi to a small local museum.

San Francisco residents are fairly fed up with their streets being used as a testing ground for the emerging technology. Robotaxi complaints are way up in the Bay Area, especially after two cars blocked traffic on a busy weekend. Journalist Lyanne Melendez at ABC 7 was initially excited to take her first trip in a self-driving taxi. The plan was to pick up her son from the nearby Randall Museum. She expressed confidence in the Waymo's safe driving, despite the car stopping to pick her up on a completely opposite corner half a block away.

Then the problems really began.

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Folks in San Francisco are not pleased with the self-driving cars taking over their streets, and now they seem to be taking action. A new TikTok trend shows San Francisco citizens disabling robo-taxis using the humble and widely available traffic cone.

It's safe to say Google's Waymo and GM's Cruise seem to have worn out their welcome in the Bay Area. The snafus have been numerous; stalled cars have randomly blocked traffic on busy nights, blocked buses, interfered with first responders and even knowingly hit a dog. Despite the self-driving cars not proving any better than human drivers (and occasionally proving much worse), the two companies are trying to expand both their operating hours and territory.

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It can be tough to keep up on the myriad of messed-up decisions and scandals in just the automotive industry alone, but a story from the New Republic manages to connect everything together and boy, is it a tough look at our collective predicament.

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In March of last year, a Tesla employee was fired for posting a video of his private Model 3 running into bollards while in Full Self-Driving Mode Beta. Well, he's back and with a much more disturbing video.

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Concert-goers left San Francisco's Outside Lands Music Festival Friday bracing for bad traffic, not knowning a gaggle of Cruise robotaxis would make the mess much, much worse.

The snarl happened just after 11 p.m. on two narrow streets— Vallejo Street and Grant Avenue—where they cross with Columbus Avenue in San Francisco's North Beach neighborhood. Social media posts of the event show up to ten driverless taxis scattered haphazardly across traffic.

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Driverless taxis from Cruise have been prowling the streets of San Francisco for years, with what we might call mixed results. They're known for stopping in traffic and interrupting commutes, but rarely do things get worse than that.

Last night, a car in San Francisco hit a woman as she crossed the street. An adjacent Cruise robotaxi then parked on the woman's leg, trapping her in place until emergency crews could forcibly remove the car.

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The public's trust in self-driving cars has declined for the second year in a row, according to a study conducted by J.D. Power and MIT. The growing distrust applies to self-driving cars in general, including autonomous vehicles used by ride-hailing services, as well as autonomous driving systems such as Tesla's "Autopilot," which belies its limited capabilities through a misleading name.

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General Motors' Cruise robotaxi company says its fleet is now better equipped to deal with emergency vehicles after a number of – let's say – incidents, including a crash involving a fire truck that left one customer injured. According to Bloomberg, the company has improved the autonomous vehicles' ability to recognize different sirens, fire hoses, and caution tape. It also strengthened their advanced alert system to help them clear the way to first responders.

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Passengers in a so-called driverless taxi shared a wild moment in San Francisco when the car went rogue and tried to power down a pedestrian path. Robotaxis have had their own little reign of terror over the California city for the last few years. Thankfully, no one was injured in this recent incident caught on camera earlier this month.

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The California Department of Motor Vehicles has banned General Motors' Cruise robotaxis from operating in San Francisco. The suspension goes into effect immediately and only applies to Cruise vehicles that don't include a human driver. Self-driving prototypes with a monitor behind the wheel will still be allowed to operate.

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Cruise has ceased driverless car operations nationwide. After a very public incident involving a pedestrian, San Francisco officials and California state regulators banned the company from operations in the city, just months after approving an expansion of service. After it was discovered that the company left out key details regarding the incident involving one of its vehicles pinning and dragging a pedestrian that was hit by a human-driven car to the road, the NHTSA has stepped in to investigate the company, too.

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Things aren't going so well for General Motors' autonomous Cruise division right now. After a human driver hit a pedestrian, a robotaxi pinned her to the ground, and it later came out that the Cruise taxi actually dragged her for 20 feet before stopping. Understandably, California then banned Cruise from operating in San Francisco. As it turns out, though, Cruise had way more problems than just that one incident. Allegedly, it also knew its robotaxis were a danger to children but still kept them on the road, the Intercept reports.

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While using the driver assist system marketed as "Autopilot" in his red Tesla Model 3 on a dark 2019 morning in Delray Beach, Fla., Jeremy Banner took his hands off the wheel and trusted the system to drive for him. It had been pitched to him as a system that could do just that. But the system's sensors missed a tractor trailer crossing both lanes in front of him, and the car ran at full speed under the side of the trailer. The roof was ripped from the car, Banner was instantly killed, and the car continued driving for nearly a minute before coming to a stop at a curb. A judge ruled last week that Banner's wife's negligence lawsuit against Tesla can proceed to trial.

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A former Tesla employee in Norway has come forward as skeptical of the company's ethically questionable practices with regards to its driver assistance software packages. In an interview with the BBC Lukasz Krupski said he was concerned about the readiness of the both company's software and hardware for the task of assisted driving. The reams of leaked data Krupski took with him, including customer complaints about Tesla's braking and so-called Full Self Driving package, seem to support his skepticism.

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