Passenger Injured in Crash Involving GM Cruise Robotaxi and Firetruck
Late Thursday in San Francisco, a passenger of a Cruise robotaxi was injured when the vehicle collided with a firetruck.
The self-driving company, a subsidiary of General Motors Co, reported the accident on social media on Friday.
“One of our cars entered an intersection on a green light and was hit by an emergency vehicle that appeared to be on its way to an emergency center,” the company posted on the X platform, formerly known as Twitter. The accident happened a little after 10 p.m. in the Tenderloin area of San Francisco, Cruise said.
“We had one passenger in our car who was treated at the scene and transported by ambulance for what we believe are non-serious injuries,” the company said.
The incident raises questions about why the vehicle didn’t know to stop for an emergency vehicle and why it didn’t notice through traffic when crossing the intersection.
Video from San Francisco’s local ABC network showed the emergency vehicle was a fire truck. The San Francisco Fire Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday.
Last week, the California Public Utilities Commission voted 3 to 1 to allow Cruise and Alphabet Inc.’s Waymo to increase city areas where they can use self-driving vehicles without a safety driver and charge riders a price to do so.
The city of San Francisco, led by city attorney David Chiu, asked state regulators on Wednesday to suspend their decision to allow Cruise and Waymo to expand.
“San Francisco will suffer serious harm if cruise lines are allowed to expand in the city without restrictions on geographic area, hours of service and fleet size,” the city wrote in its 84-page motion. “As the Commission has acknowledged, the performance of Cruise’s unmanned AV devices currently in limited use and testing has disrupted emergency operations, public transit, street construction workers, and the flow of traffic in general.”
Recent posts on social media have also shown strange behavior from Cruise’s driverless vehicles. One video released Monday showed a car driving through a crosswalk even as children crossed it, and another cruise with cars behind.
