Cruise, the autonomous vehicle (AV) company, announced Thursday that it would be making improvements to its services that it claims will improve interactions between its fleet and first responders.
According to a company blog post, Cruise is now “focused on minimizing operational impact, quickly exiting emergency scenes, and increasing predictability.”
Specifically, cars will now slow down even earlier once they detect emergency sirens and added that the cars will “better detect such scenes earlier and from farther away,” but did not precisely explain how this will occur. Cruise also says its cars will “more effectively bypass double-parked emergency vehicles to help prevent the AV from getting stuck behind such emergency vehicles and blocking traffic.”
That line appears to be in direct response to an August 14 incident in San Francisco, where fire officials said a Cruise car briefly prevented an ambulance from leaving the scene of a crash where the victim ultimately died after being brought to a hospital. The San Francisco Fire Department later clarified in a statement that the agency did not “[attribute] this pedestrian death to Cruise AVs.”
Cruise, which is a subsidiary of General Motors, also wrote that “our teams will allow first responders to access the AV and manually move the vehicle” during an emergency, an ability many first responders in San Francisco have requested.
“Our goal is to enhance the AV’s responsiveness in various emergency situations and continuously improve,” said Navideh Forghani, a Cruise spokesperson, in an emailed statement sent to Forbes.
This announcement came on the same day the Cruise announced it is expanding its services to Houston. The company also operates in Phoenix and Austin and is currently testing in at least 10 other U.S. cities, including San Diego and Nashville.
On the Big Tech podcast last week, Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt said that the company is set to exponentially increase in the coming years, reaching thousands of operational AVs next year, “and it will continue 10X growth every year for the foreseeable future.” Vogt imagined a near future where the company would first operate a robotaxi service, soon to be followed by “personal vehicle ownership” of AVs.
For their part, the SFFD and the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, which both have expressed frustration around their agencies’ interactions with AVs, said in a joint statement that they were pleased with the new changes, adding “we are eager to see Cruise’s software upgrades help prevent future incidents.”
San Francisco Supervisor Aaron Peskin, a local legislator who for months has expressed concern about the rollout of AVs in his city, told Forbes that Cruise’s announcement today “totally and absolutely vindicates the city and county of San Francisco and definitively is an admission that their vehicles were not ready for prime time.”
When asked if he thought the modifications were sufficient, Capt. Justin Schorr, an SFFD spokesperson, said in a text message to Forbes: “We won’t know until we can evaluate the cars in the field. The collaboration is the key and keeping it productive moving forward.”
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