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From the rear seat of a driverless automobile in San Francisco, Cade Metz covered this tale.

Information Technology

This month, I hailed a car outside a restaurant a few blocks from Golden Gate Park at around 9 p.m. on a cool Tuesday night.

A white Mercedes parked next to me as I waited at a stoplight a short while later. With their heads bobbing above the roof, three teens were sitting on the ledges of its open windows. One of them pointed to my car's unoccupied front seat.

He shouted, "Who's driving?"

Nobody, I screamed back.

I was in a driverless car driven by Cruise, a GM-backed startup that is now providing affordable trips to a select group of fortunate and especially brave individuals in San Francisco.

Many businesses have been predicting the arrival of driverless automobiles that can be summoned with the tap of an app for the better part of a decade. There always seems to be a few more years after those few.  

And considering the astronomical cost of producing and running the cars, I can't help but question if these companies will ever be able to turn their labour into a sustainable business.

That evening, the little Chevy Bolt in which we were riding changed lanes on its own. Before accelerating through a crossing, it waited for people walking their dogs to pass. It manoeuvred around vehicles that were parked in the centre of the road and had their warning lights on.

predicting the arrival of driverless automobiles that can be summoned with the tap of an app for the better part of a decade.

Remember the memorable, tire-squealing chase sequence from the 1960 Steve McQueen film "Bullitt"? Imagine the reverse now, and you'll get a feel of how the car delicately negotiated four-way intersections, swerved around double-parked vehicles, and slowly drove up and down San Francisco's hills.However, even for a writer like me who has had some experience with this technology over the past few years, driving through a big metropolis without a driver was enlightening.

Not that there weren't problems, mind you. The automobile swung aggressively to the right as it passed the adolescent joyriders a second time, probably thinking they were pedestrians. It braked suddenly as the light turned red at another crossing, sliding to a stop in the centre of a crosswalk with its nose poking out into the intersection. As he passed, a man flipped off my robot driver and yelled at it. If that was more or less enjoyable than yelling at a person, I couldn't say.

And then the car spotted a potential accident and pulled over as we entered some evening traffic. Even though it was a false alarm, the automobile wouldn't move. The journey was over.

You might one day travel in a car that is completely autonomous. One of the businesses creating robot taxi services in significant American cities is Cruise, which plans to extend its services to Austin, Texas, and Phoenix by the end of the year. The parent company of Google, which owns Waymo, is getting ready to launch a second service in San Francisco. Ford and Volkswagen are funding Argo AI, which is being developed in Miami and Austin. Hyundai-backed Motional has its sights set on Las Vegas.

The technology, however, is still a work in progress.

Since the end of 2019, Waymo has run a fully autonomous service in the Phoenix suburbs, where the roads are wide and there are few people. It doesn't get any harder than San Francisco, with its high hills and tight, crowded streets, maybe at Times Square.

Currently, Cruise only offers passenger service with roughly 30 cars, on a limited number of San Francisco streets, and only between the hours of 10 p.m. and 5:30 a.m., when there is little to no traffic. Its vehicles have a top speed of around 30 mph, and they stop in snow, fog, and torrential rain.

In San Francisco, it's anticipated that Cruise and Waymo will increase service availability to more people in more communities at more practical times of day. And soon, driverless services will be available in places all around the Sun Belt, where snow is infrequent and regulators are frequently benevolent toward the industry. However, it will take some time.

Each new service needs months of planning, testing, and agreements with government representatives. Furthermore, despite thorough testing, these vehicles will undoubtedly run into situations that they are simply not equipped to manage. What transpires next is the question for Cruise and other businesses.

The vehicles may become "confused."

Cruise hosted a modest press conference at their downtown San Francisco headquarters earlier in the evening.

For the first time, Cruise's CEO, Kyle Vogt, was going to give reporters genuine autonomous rides; typically, safety drivers are present during driverless car tests in case something goes wrong. In some circumstances, he cautioned, the cars might become "confused," and if that happened, the corporation, which was keeping an eye on things from a remote operations centre, might need to send out personnel to recover the cars. Those occurrences are incredibly uncommon, he claimed.

The majority of roadside situations, including stop-and-go traffic, lane changes, and right-hand turns, can be handled by the cars fairly well. However, some scenarios are more challenging than others, including unprotected left turns, jaywalkers, and, it turns out, a little camera tripod sticking out of a window.

But this is where I'm going too fast.

The majority of roadside situations, including stop-and-go traffic, lane changes, and right-hand turns, can be handled by the cars fairly well.

One of Cruise's cars was transporting a passenger down Geary Boulevard in the Richmond District of San Francisco on June 3, two days after California authorities gave the company a permission for commercial rides without a driver. This was not too far from where I had my robot ride. The automobile started turning left down a side street when the traffic light was green.

Cruise's automobile halted as a Toyota Prius came up from the opposite direction, anticipating the Prius would likewise make a turn. However, the Prius kept going through the junction. There was an automobile crash.

An accident report states that the Prius was partially to blame for the crash since it was driving at around 40 mph in a 25 mph zone. Both vehicles' occupants received medical attention for what appear to be minor injuries. The incident demonstrated the type of difficult scenario that autonomous vehicles in urban settings will unavoidably encounter. Federal regulators issued a software recall, and Cruise modified its technology to handle similar circumstances while also suspending unprotected left-hand turns across its fleet.

Unsettling, impressive, confusing, and eerie

I started my journey at Bistro Central Parc, a local eatery. I was informed by a Cruise representative that in order to hail a car, I would need to download the company's app. But I was unable. My girls tease me because I use an Android phone, but the app is only compatible with iPhones. So I was given a loaner by the corporation.

For reporters, Cruise opened the opportunity for riding an hour early. I hired a car for a three-mile roundtrip to Grace Cathedral on Nob Hill just at nine o'clock in the evening. Photographer Jason Henry would travel with me on the trip, which the app said would last around 21 minutes, or around 50% longer than an Uber with a human driver would regularly take. When you can't go faster than 30 mph, life moves more slowly.

After waiting a little while for the car to arrive (passengers cannot sit in the front), we slid into the back seat where we were soon hailed by an unidentified voice. A tech support agent's voice asked if we needed assistance starting the ride (it seems we were taking our sweet time as photographed the car inside and out).

We hit a large red button on one of the tablet computers in front of us to decline the offer and then rolled along at a legal speed that seemed excessively slow compared to the typical Uber driver.

We were advised by an automated message to keep our hands and arms inside the vehicle at all times.

The ride alternated between being eerie, impressive, confusing, and mildly stressful. Similar like riding in the car with my 16-year-old daughter as she practised driving, but more terrifying because at least my daughter could react to my panicky times.

The front seat of a Cruise car appears to be the same as any other car's front seat when you are seated behind a plexiglass shield similar to that found in a vintage New York City taxi cab. However, there is no one in that seat. A button to dial tech support is located at the back, above the two tablet computers, along with a speaker you can use to speak with the robotic voice.

I think that's it.

The automobile drove obediently. It reacted with what appeared to be confidence when people crossed the street in front of it, patiently moving forward before speeding up when its path was clear.

It gently steered around a work zone that was delineated by orange cones and a huge yellow arrow, waiting for another automobile to pass on the right before continuing. It curled around a truck that was impolitely parked against the curb at a severe angle. And it made several stops for pedestrians who appeared to be about to cross the street, even though these stops frequently jolted the people in the back seat. It also had a bad habit of suddenly slowing down in the middle of an empty block. Maybe it repeatedly noticed something that I missed.

About five miles into our journey, on the way back to the restaurant, we travelled west on Geary Boulevard in the hopes of turning left onto Van Ness Avenue, a significant road.

We were curious to see how the car would handle the crossroads because it is one of the busier intersections in the city and, as it turned out, has a lot of foot activity on a Tuesday at around 9:30 p.m. The car appeared to take side streets rather than main roads for the majority of the journey, avoiding congested areas and unprotected left-hand turns. However, there were parked cars in front of and behind us as we got closer to Van Ness. The automobile abruptly aborted its turn and swerved to the side of the road.

The unreal voice said, "A potential collision was detected.

Mr. Henry rolled down his window halfway and used a little tripod to balance his iPhone on the edge of the glass just before the automobile came to a stop. To have a better view of what was going on in front of the car, that had been the plan. A Cruise representative claimed the action scared the car after the journey. The tripod's one leg had been on the windows' outside.

According to the firm, if someone attempted to climb out the window or if an object was "protruding unsafely" from the automobile, the car would pull over to the curb.

But if a passenger waves to a friend from a short distance outside the window, according to the business, this normally won't happen.

When something goes wrong, the automobiles are meant to stop. When police officers pulled over a Cruise car in April because their headlights weren't on, the car appeared to start to move away from them as they approached the window. Similar to how it acts when it sees an iPhone mounted on a tripod, it was pulling to the curb.

The voice, which was not actually our car, asked us if we were okay and then announced that the ride would soon resume. It never did, though. The voice informed us that we would have to exit the vehicle a short while later. A technician from Cruise would have to visit and inspect it.

Cruise claims that this is regular procedure, but it has had trouble with stuck vehicles in the past. At the end of June, the fleet's communication issues caused many of the vehicles to cluster in one area like a caravan gone awry, congealing traffic in the centre of the city. After I got off the car, similar instances persisted all across the city.

As the episode demonstrated, automobiles occasionally still need human assistance, even when they run without a driver. Techs may occasionally be able to assist remotely. They need to lend a hand in person at times.

That is expensive. Furthermore, it raises the question of whether robot taxis will ever be less expensive than conventional ones.

The cars cost tens of thousands of dollars more than the typical Uber car because they are outfitted with sophisticated sensors, computer chips, and other technology. Costs for these vehicles are increased by hundreds of millions of dollars — at least temporarily  because to the research costs, back-end computing infrastructure, and technicians required to service them. According to General Motors, Cruise lost more than $860 million in the first half of this year alone. Those costs might decrease one day.

The automobile appeared lonesome as we exited the back seat and shut the door. Only waiting could be done.

However, I still possessed the loaner phone. We were driven back to Bistro Central as a result of my calling another Cruise. This time, no issues. We avoided touching the windows with our hands, arms, and tripods.