- Garbage City FC
- Posts
- Robot taxis keep fucking up
Robot taxis keep fucking up
We might have pulled the trigger a little too soon on this emerging technology
Surely you’ve seen them on the streets. The ugly white cars with the spinning turrets on top that drive like your grandmother after a benzo, but with no one behind the eerily turning wheel. They’re the future of transportation, they tell us. Except they suck ass and keep fucking up.
San Francisco Fire Chief Jeanine Nicholson said there have been more than 50 cases of the self-driving vehicles interfering with or impeding emergency responders so far this year.
"I appreciate the safety that autonomous vehicles can bring to the table in terms of no drunk drivers, no speeding all of that kind of stuff," said Chief Nicholson. "However, they're still not ready for prime time because of how they've impacted our operations."
Don’t worry, Chief! Prashanthi Raman from Cruise says everything’s cool! “Cruise AVs have now driven 3 million miles safely, the vast majority of which go unnoticed," he said. That somehow fails to give me comfort! The vast majority of bullets fired in America also go unnoticed, until one of them ends up in you or one of your loved ones!
Somebody didn’t vast the majority last night:
A driverless Cruise car with a passenger inside collided with an emergency vehicle in San Francisco Thursday night, the company said.
Shortly after 10 p.m., the driverless Cruise car, which had a green light, entered the intersection at Polk and Turk streets in the Tenderloin, the company wrote in a tweet Friday morning, and was hit by an emergency vehicle that was en route to an emergency scene. The company did not specify what type of emergency vehicle it was.
This is a Simpsons joke come to life. Imagine being in your robot car and seeing an ambulance bearing down on you and knowing in just a second you’re gonna have to ask if they can double up.
This wild ride was recently approved by the 4-member California Public Utilities Commission. One of the commissioners is John Reynolds. According to his online bio, “Prior to his appointment to the CPUC, Commissioner Reynolds served as Managing Counsel at Cruise LLC since 2019.”
Oh. Gee, I wonder how he voted?
Not a day goes by that I don’t see a story about these automated hellhounds blocking traffic or almost hitting a pedestrian. I saw one of their fuckups firsthand: one of them was parked in front of my neighbor’s driveway, hazards blinking, blocking her from getting into her own damn garage.
Look, I know the rejoinder: regular human cars hit people every day, and no one is calling for their abolition! (Well, some poeple are, but no one takes them seriously.) BUT you can yell at a human “GET THE FUCK OUT OF THE WAY YOU’RE BLOCKING THE ROAD YOU MORON” and if you look mean enough or have a badge, they will do that. When cops yell at robocars that have just inserted themselves into the scene of a fire and then decided to stop and have a breather, nothing happens.
We all know where this is going. Eventually human drivers in Uber and Lyft are gonna be phased out and these Zune buggies will taking everyone’s drunk ass home at exactly one mile under the speed limit. It’s the future and we cannot stop it. In fact, the robots have only one known predator: a strategically placed traffic cone.
Oh well. At least there’s one advantage over human-piloted cars.
Reply