Cruise's robotaxis blocked Sanfranciso downtown?

Overview

Cruise is one of the leading companies developing autonomous vehicles and robotaxis. They also recently started advertising their ‘Fully autonomous robotaxis’ in SanFrancisco, CA after receiving a driverless CPUC license. Immediately a few days later we had reports of these robotaxis being pulled over by cops video here. What happened for the taxis to pull over ? Cruise has been silent for quite a while.

On the whole, after reading a bit and consulting with experts, it looks like either a networking issue that is causing the V2X communications to fail or complex mapping error. Either all mapped end destinations were the same or the rasterized HD maps had some bugs. What really went wrong? No one (for now) apart from Cruise knows! Although the issue looks to be mundane at first, there are several implications that one needs to think of -

1. What happens when the fleet expands? Can we have map free solutions?
2. What happens in adverse weather conditions, if the communications fail, will the taxis make ‘safe’ decisions and avoid such roadblocks?
3. What happens if the remote connections break down ? Can authorities unlock the vehicles and move them until Cruise employees arrive? They arrived within a few hours in the above case!

Although Cruise is a leading transportation company, I think it still needs to complete a learning curve that Waymo (and May mobility for some part) has undergone. Rather than criticizing Cruise, as always, we (the AV community) shall learn from these issues, develop safer solutions and move ahead! AVs are coming.

Additional reading from CNBC and Techcrunch.