By Michael Elkins
Traffic was halted in San Francisco late Tuesday, when half a dozen Cruise robotaxis stopped operating in the middle of the Gough and Fulton Streets intersection, TechCrunch reported. Traffic was blocked for a couple of hours until employees could reach the vehicles and manually move them.
The event quickly landed on social media with one poster saying “It was a pretty surreal event. Humans had to come and manually take the cars away. Cruise should get fined to s*** for blocking the street off for so long. They even made it so the street sweeper couldn’t hit an entire block.”
Fines for blocking the street sweeper are around $76 per car in San Francisco.
Cruise, an autonomous ride-hailing service owned by General Motors (NYSE:GM) launched its first fully driverless, commercial robotaxi service less than a week ago. The autonomous ride-hailing service initially operated between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. on designated streets and without a human safety operator behind the wheel.
Cruise has yet to respond to questions as to what caused the vehicles to stop and why the vehicles had to be manually driven away. It is unclear if the vehicles had passengers when they stopped.