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Transportation United States

Cruise CEO Says SF 'Should Be Rolling Out the Red Carpet' for Robotaxis, Threatens To Maybe Leave Town (sfist.com) 125

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
In his first major public interview since the DMV cut their San Francisco fleet in half, Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt said "we cannot expect perfection" from the self-driving cars, and vaguely threatened to leave town if regulators curtail them any further. From a report: The self-driving robotaxis of GM subsidiary Cruise and Google-owned Waymo seemed like they were heading in a successful direction when they won approval from the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) last month to run their self-driving robotaxis at all hours in SF without restrictions. But barely a week later, the California DMV demanded Cruise cut it SF fleet in half, following post-Outside Lands stalling incidents, a night of multiple accidents, and SF City Attorney David Chiu filing a motion to get the CPUC to reverse their decision.

Cruse CEO Kyle Vogt sat down for a (very friendly) 40-minute interview Wednesday at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference, which can be seen in its entirety above. And he seems to be going on offense against the regulatory pushback his company is getting from SF and California lawmakers. "It's kind of fun as a society to poke at the differences between AVs (autonomous vehicles) and humans, but if we're serious about safety in our cities, we should be rolling out the red carpet for AVs," Vogt said, according to the SF Standard.
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Cruise CEO Says SF 'Should Be Rolling Out the Red Carpet' for Robotaxis, Threatens To Maybe Leave Town More

Cruise CEO Says SF 'Should Be Rolling Out the Red Carpet' for Robotaxis, Threatens To Maybe Leave Town

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  • Cruise (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ArchieBunker ( 132337 ) on Friday September 22, 2023 @11:05AM (#63869077)

    Where did I hear that name? Oh yes when they gridlocked a street. https://www.thedrive.com/news/... [thedrive.com]

    What a fucking baby of a CEO. Give us sweet deals or else.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Where did I hear that name? Oh yes when they gridlocked a street. https://www.thedrive.com/news/... [thedrive.com]

      What a fucking baby of a CEO. Give us sweet deals or else.

      Yeah, it's amusing how these self declared winners of the great meritocracy tend to become petulant toddlers whenever don't win the great meritocracy and somebody with enough pull won't declare them the winners anyway.

      • I've seen a lot of these meritocracy wannabes claiming that they have a brilliant idea, but they just need a lot of funding and a few hundred employees to do the actual work. I presume the wannabes' actual role is to sit back and take credit? Usually they go nowhere, due to lack of funding, but I can hear them whining about how everyone is dumb except them and me (or whoever it is they're talking to at the time).

    • It wasn't just a matter of "causing gridlock"... the Cruise vehicles caught on a low-hanging power wire and dragged it half a block, and also blocked access to emergency vehicles. Slashdot covered this story only two months ago: https://tech.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org]

  • Translation: (Score:5, Insightful)

    by nightflameauto ( 6607976 ) on Friday September 22, 2023 @11:05AM (#63869079)

    "Be our guinea pig for our shitty half-assed self-driving cars or we'll take our ball and go home."

    I believe a proper response to that statement would be, "OK." An optional wave and smile could be placed after the "OK."

    • A slightly more diplomatic answer would be: "I Accept your proposition." And then wave and smile.
      • A more appropriate answer is to follow with a middle finger. Respect is earned, and should not just be shoved down people's throats.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by Calydor ( 739835 )

          Respect is earned, yes. But common courtesy (waving instead of giving someone the finger) should be your baseline.

          • After what these assholes have been doing to SF with their lack of safety drivers, a middle finger is more polite than they deserve.

            Acceptance of abuse is not tolerance, it is enablement.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Zak3056 ( 69287 )

      "Be our guinea pig for our shitty half-assed self-driving cars or we'll take our ball and go home."

      I believe a proper response to that statement would be, "OK." An optional wave and smile could be placed after the "OK."

      "Your proposal is acceptable." [youtu.be]

    • I don't know why he hasn't figured out by now that San Francisco is the least business-friendly large city in the entire country. Dude should read the room sometime. Pack up his shit and move to Houston. Plenty of shitty traffic to test out the vehicles in, and a business friendly climate to boot.

      • Not Houston, but they're in Austin, and apparently causing problems there, too. [mysanantonio.com]

        I don't blame SF for wanting to curtail them. They're obviously not ready for prime time, and busy city streets aren't a proper testing environment.

      • SF is so unfriendly to business they gave these corporations permits to test their alpha version quality hardware on public streets. Wait, what?

        SF is so unfriendly to business that they gave out cheap permits to build unneeded office buildings amidst a housing crisis. Wait, what?

        SF is so unfriendly to business they gave permits to build housing developments in industrial areas causing massive gentrification, wait, what?

        I can do this all day. LMK if you still haven't got the message.

    • They should make him Secretary of State. Send him to negotiate with China.

    • I believe a proper response to that statement would be, "OK." An optional wave and smile could be placed after the "OK."

      If I were Cruise, I would be looking for cities which are rolling out a red carpet, not ones stuffed full of people who think cars are evil and transportation peaked with the invention of the fixie bicycle. And I'd secure that greeting before launching the service.

      Seriously, if I were Cruise or Waymo, SF and NYC would be the absolute last cities on my list to support. I'd start with Houston, Atlanta, or Detroit, something like that.

  • is the ceo willing to do time in san quentin when (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Joe_Dragon ( 2206452 ) on Friday September 22, 2023 @11:05AM (#63869083)

    is the ceo willing to do time in san quentin when the self driveing car kills someone?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      is the ceo willing to do time in san quentin when the self driveing car kills someone?

      The question you should have asked was "Is the CEO willing to have every employee, board member, and shareholder do time in San Quentin when one of his self-driving cars kills someone?"

      • Nah. We always hear how the CEOs are the ones making the big bucks because they're the face of the company, make all the big decisions, and take all the big risks.

        So let them pay the big consequences if something goes wrong. GP was right on target.

    • More importantly, how is some tech bro having a hissy fit newsworthy?

    • Honestly, from all of the problems and considering SF traffic they probably don't move very fast at all.

    • is the ceo willing to do time in san quentin when the self driveing car kills someone?

      Just as soon as we jail the CEO of every other company who's product causes a fatality.

      Boy, it was nice having pharmaceuticals, air travel, and electricity while it lasted...

  • ok (Score:4, Insightful)

    by phantomfive ( 622387 ) on Friday September 22, 2023 @11:10AM (#63869091) Journal
    ok, please leave. San Francisco gets no benefit from letting them test cars.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dgatwood ( 11270 )

      Agreed. Don't let the door hit you in the you-know-where on your way out.

    • Hey, don't sell the solution short!

      They could be:

      1) Traveling Shelter pods for the homeless, allowing them to sleep comfortably while being ferried in luxury around SF. Come to think of it, they can use them to migrate the homeless out of SF and into Sacramento where they belong.
      2) Traveling Porta-Johns. Rather than spending millions for one public bathroom, use the self-driving taxis as portable toilets.

  • ...and weep all over his bags of money. Let's not give him a single inch.
    If the arrogant bastard wants to take his shit elsewhere, good riddance. Bye bye!

  • "We cannot expect perfection."

    I agree. But your shitty excuses as to why SF can't hire human drivers long enough to put up with the smell of excrement while driving through a refuse of a town requiring you to suddenly support robots delivering your workers back into an office to justify your obscene commercial real estate costs, still stinks.

  • ... as Johnny Cab [fandom.com].

    But without the exploding heads.

  • Reckless (Score:4, Interesting)

    by flippy ( 62353 ) on Friday September 22, 2023 @11:29AM (#63869147) Homepage

    Mr. Vogt would be better served learning when to keep his mouth shut.

    To put AVs on the road in a mixed autonomous/human driver scenario, it would make sense to me to require proof that the accident and severity rates from the AVs be at least as low as for human drivers, preferably lower, in a mixed autonomous/human driver scenario .

    It is reckless to purposely allow something less safe on the road. It would increase the risk of injury or death to every driver and or passenger in either type of vehicle.

    • Regardless of accidents I'd also like the roads not to gridlock when cellular goes down and the army of babysitters can't nudge the cars in the right direction.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by flippy ( 62353 )
        That would certainly be a useful addition.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by guruevi ( 827432 )

        If all cellular goes down in a city, there'd be more than a bit of gridlock. All the apps and people relying on maps apps and geolocation, the traffic lights and cameras automated managing of flows etc.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by haggie ( 957598 )

      Please point out ANY incident in SF where an AV struck and killed a pedestrian.

      By comparison, 30 people die, and over 500 are injured annually in human-driven incidents.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by flippy ( 62353 )

        Please point out ANY incident in SF where an AV struck and killed a pedestrian.

        By comparison, 30 people die, and over 500 are injured annually in human-driven incidents.

        The fact that, not living anywhere near SF, I personally don't have the data on hand, is not a proper argument to allow them. You didn't pay attention to my post. If Cruise/Vogt indeed has such data, that would satisfy my first condition.

        Also notice that I didn't say "pedestrian". You introduced that extra data restriction into this conversation. I'm talking about ALL types of accidents (even fender-benders with no injuries). Again, if Cruise has such data, let them present such to the public.

      • Just to begin with, there are on the order of a million cars in San Francisco, and fewer than a thousand autonomous vehicles. How many accidents would there be if there were 100,000 driverless cars? Do you know?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by guruevi ( 827432 )

          So currently there are 0.1% autonomous vehicles with 0 accidents and 99.9% with ~600 injuries/deaths annually in SF.

          If you simply extrapolated today's numbers and scaled them to 100,000 autonomous vehicles, the number would remain 0 for the autonomous cars but you'd have an allowance of 60 injuries/deaths before they are any 'worse' than human drivers.

          • No, that is still wrong. Turn your brain on.

            You need to compare like with like. The cars are driving in safer parts of the city, they don't operate in bad weather, etc. How do humans do in those situations? The cars are observably bad at driving.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by flippy ( 62353 )
            You're using haggie's number of 0, which is, even according to them, the number of pedestrians struck by the AVs, not the total number of accidents AVs have been involved in. I haven't seen data that shows all accidents that AVs have been involved in, and if it exists, I'd very much like to see it. That's the data I've been asking for since my initial comment.

    • People who keep their mouths shut when they don't know what they're talking about will never become CEOs.

    • I believe they have proposed to have a dedicated autonomous vehicle lane—public infrastructure for a private enterprise.

  • I think most people are too uncharitable to his intentions, if he was just in it for the money he'd be gone already.

    He's a true believer, probably somewhat to justify his extreme wealth to himself ... he will save us all from car crashes, it's real in his mind.

  • We are not having all the GM's problems with the Waymo cars. Cruise are running their cars around the same blocks all night in the avenues, padding the miles driven without incident. Just a matter of time before someone dies that is totally their fault.

  • ...the existing "fleet" of human drivers who never run over pedestrians, block emergency vehicles, shoot at each other, run red lights, or break down unexpectedly.

  • Misleading and Charged headline (Score:4, Interesting)

    by SmaryJerry ( 2759091 ) on Friday September 22, 2023 @11:40AM (#63869195)
    The actual interview on youtube is embedded in the article and the interview literally asks along the lines of "if your permit is revoked will Cruise stay in San Francisco?" There is no "threat" whatsoever. They are basically asking "would you break the law?" This is apparently the "vaguely indicated" part, as written by the article, where there is a "threat to maybe leave town." Literally twisting words to get there.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by khchung ( 462899 )

      The actual interview on youtube is embedded in the article and the interview literally asks along the lines of "if your permit is revoked will Cruise stay in San Francisco?" There is no "threat" whatsoever. They are basically asking "would you break the law?" This is apparently the "vaguely indicated" part, as written by the article, where there is a "threat to maybe leave town." Literally twisting words to get there.

      That is how ALL American MSM operates, "create story" even when there is no story at all. This kind of semantics trap is what American so-called journalists do whenever they do interviews. That's why Musk required a livesteam of his interview with BBC, he has been burned by the "media" before.

      Journalist: "If someone punches you, would you hit back?"
      X: "Yeah"

      Headline: "X threatens to punch others"

  • well, bye.

    I'm guessing he's talking to the politicians he's bribing and not the people in the city. Local politics are ridiculously corrupt.
  • Or "Screw you guys I'm going home"

  • If I were a CEO, especially one whose company is involved in a bit of controversy, I'd be really careful about doing interviews. Especially if when talking to a friendly interviewer.

    I couldn't find a transcript, but it seems to me that people are most likely to something really dumb it's usually when they're talking to a friendly reporter who basically agrees with everything they say.

  • Your terms are acceptable.
  • Yes, 'We will find another town in which to slow traffic and/or eventually kill people.' Or would a robotaxi have not driven off that bridge?

  • Threatening like a 4 year old is ridiculous.
    Pack up and go home cry baby.

  • So these governments should pander to these companies and their experiments that risk the lives and property of the tax paying citizens. I am so sick of the tech industry and their lousy âoeDisruptionâ.
  • The protesters win then. Game over

  • I have mixed feelings on this.

    I am in favor of automated vehicles providing on-demand transportation. I think they will be a great benefit.

    But they aren't there yet. The regulators job is to see that things don't go wrong... and Cruise isn't doing so great. They may be learning, but they have a ways to go. So it makes sense for the regulator to step in and place restrictions on them until they improve.

    And then there is the attitude. Anyone who pulls the "I'm too good for this. Give me what I want or I

  • Don't go.
  • Don't threaten us with a good time. Oh, and, do better than Lime and Uber have with scooters and take your useless shit with you when you leave.
  • What San Francisco really needs to solve their chronic housing shortages, epidemic-levels of homelessness, crime, drug abuse, urban blight, dead malls, empty stores, a leaning Millennium Tower, fires, earth quakes and locust infestations.... San Francisco needs Robotaxis!!!! It's almost as comical as the "Monorail Episode" of the Simpsons. "...Or I guess Robotaxis are more of a Shelbyville kind of thing?"
  • Their other primary mission is bending us Californians over for PG&E to fuck us more on rates. Fuck the CPUC

  • Surely the minimum test process for FSD cars before letting them anywhere near a real road would be.
    1. Prove it can drive round a closed road reliably without outside intervention.
    2. Prove it can do the above and cope with static unmapped objects appearing on each lap.
    3. Prove it can do the above and cope with simulated pedestrians/animals leaping into its path at random.
    4. Prove it can do the above and cope with multiple other robotaxis on the same closed circuit travelling in different directions.

    Has anyo

  • SLC is the franchise proving ground of the world. With a homogeneous population. ample economy and luxury of the widest streets in America, Cruise could take its little taxi for a spin where everyone else trials great ideas. It’s one thing to conquer techies and a 7mi X 7mi matrix, but quite another to win over ordinary Americans.
    If the little taxi Cruise can taxi in SLC, GM can scale robotaxi nationwide.

  • close the door on your way out,

  • SF is a cesspit of crime, corruption and regional idiocy.

    Stop trying to fix this toasted abortion.

    LET IT BURN.

  • If SF simply put a red carpet on every Cruise route, it really would simplify the needed AI.

  • The CEO, pointing to old hearings that approved autonomous vehicles, says "the people have spoken".

    The people can speak again! Otherwise Trump would be BDFL.

    An exit is a win-win. You go where your cars are not hampered and don't hamper others. The only thing you lose out on is visibility

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