Cruise’s SF cars aren’t as self-driving as they seem, NYT reports

San Francisco’s Cruise cars may not be as self-driving as they appear.

The company’s empty vehicles, which have been zooming around the city since 2020, were stalled last week when the California DMV revoked Cruise’s permits to test and charge for rides with driverless vehicles. Two days later, Cruise paused its autonomous testing nationwide.

Now, a report from the New York Times has shed light on the fleet’s apparently not-so-autonomous driving. Workers have been remotely assisting Cruise cars every 2.5 to 5 miles in San Francisco, according to the outlet’s sources.

The company’s driverless vehicles have made a variety of high-profile errors in recent months, including when one hit a pedestrian and continued to drive for 20 feet with the person trapped underneath. According to the Times, Cruise’s operations staff is huge, employing one and a half workers per vehicle in San Francisco as of Oct. 24. All of this is getting expensive for Cruise parent company General Motors, which said on an October earnings call that it lost around $1.9 billion on the autonomous carmaker between January and September. Earlier this week, Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt told workers that layoffs could be coming, the Times reported.

In an email to SFGATE, Cruise spokesperson Navideh Forghani confirmed the Times reporting on both the operations staffing numbers and the frequency with which workers have manually intervened during autonomous testing, as well as the CEO’s reference to possible layoffs. The spokesperson declined to say when the company might restart driverless operations. 

The company is still doing “supervised driverless” testing in the city, during which a human sits in the driver’s seat and can take over as needed, according to Forghani. But much of the fleet is sitting stagnant.

Cruise’s reported reliance on human assistance calls into question Vogt’s earlier claims that Cruise would eventually be cheaper to operate than Uber or Lyft because of those firms’ cost of “paying an entire human livable wage,” which he made on an Oct. 6 episode of the “Big Technology Podcast.” 

The CEO previously downplayed safety concerns as “sensationalized” to the Washington Post, in an interview published a few weeks before a Cruise car dragged a pedestrian for 20 feet. “No one has ever been seriously hurt across several million miles of driving and hundreds of thousands of rides provided in San Francisco,” he told the outlet, arguing that autonomous cars were being unfairly subjected to a “double standard” when it came to safe driving.

Hear of anything happening at Cruise or another tech company? Contact tech reporter Stephen Council securely at stephen.council@sfgate.com or on Signal at 628-204-5452.