On Friday night, June 10, nine people were wounded in a shooting in the Mission District in San Francisco. When emergency responders arrived on the scene, they discovered a Cruise RoboTaxi sitting in the middle of the street — preventing emergency vehicles from getting through to the victims. From The Guardian:
Emergency crews were responding to a shooting on 24th Street shortly after 9pm in which nine people were injured. In a video posted to Twitter, a Cruise self-driving car is seen in the road as an officer approaches it and says it's "blocking emergency medical and fire. I've got to get it out of here now."
A spokesperson for the GM-owned Cruise robotaxi service replied on Twitter, insisting that their self-driving vehicle was just trying to pull a uey.
Another Cruise spokesperson later clarified that one of their employees arrived on the scene within a half hour to manually move the car. By that point, however, the vehicle had already been surrounded by police tape. None of which sounds like a u-turn to me!
This isn't the first time Cruise robotaxis have blocked road access during an emergency, either. Back in March, CNBC reported that several Cruise cars stalled in the aftermath of a torrential rainstorm. Apparently the downed trees and telephone wires threw their sensors into overdrive, causing them to panic and just sort of bumble around.
Cruise robotaxi appears to hinder emergency crews after mass shooting [Rose Horowitch / The Guardian]
