My Taxi Was A Robot
I invested in Cruise in 2014 because of the founder and his vision. But it took 8 years to get my first ride in a real robo-taxi and only because San Francisco is home of the innovation economy.
Thursday evening. Lovely dinner with friends. Late enough that I could call my first robot-taxi to take me home. Here I am saying goodbye to my friends (who took the picture). Would I survive the ride? What does it feel like to be driven through city streets in a car with no driver? I really hoped I hadn’t made a mistake….
The next day SF Gate published “Multiple driverless Cruise cars block traffic in San Francisco”. Multiple meant two, and no one was hurt. Including me; I got to my apartment building safe and sound. My ride finished with a cop car turning its lights on to go around Banana Slug while it dropped me off; I suspect the police are wary of these driverless cars!
(Did you ever see the video of the SF police chasing an unmanned Cruise car?)
There’s so much to say about participating in what clearly is the future (once we figure out how to get humans to stop driving in cities). Here’s the video of my ride I posted on Twitter.
To be honest, this future is going to be slow to arrive. And the reason is us. A future where all cars are autonomous is entrancing, but meanwhile 99% of us who own cars are going to be really slow to give them up. And as long as humans are driving, we have to deal with the frail of humans, people who want to show how fast their car is or get distracted by talking to the passenger or texting on their phone, etc. This vision won’t be complete until there are pre-defined areas in major cities where only autonomous vehicles can operate and the autonomous vehicles are integrated into an intelligent traffic management system. I won’t see that in my lifetime.
But meanwhile if you, want to get a glimpse of and maybe even participate in The Future, come to San Francisco. Download the Cruise app (enough before you arrive to get approved to use it). Stay up until at least 10pm and call a Cruise in the area defined by SF regulators as approved for the sale of rides in a Cruise car (generally the part of San Francisco that goes from North Beach to the Great Highway, including the Fillmore and Hayes Valley.)
I took this photo a few days after my ride; it’s the way of San Francisco. Two other companies are working to be able to compete with Cruise, which is the only company authorized to sell rides in cars without safety drivers: Zoox and Waymo. You see this a lot: two or more AVs (with safety drivers) cruising (pun intended) the streets of San Francisco, gathering data and hoping to get regulatory approval for their cars to pick up riders. I’ve even seen two Zoox cars going in tandem!
Two days after my ride, the The NY Times wrote this report, “Stuck on the Streets of San Francisco in a Driverless Car”. (How did the NYT get their ride at 9:47pm?) It’s not news that the cars do their job and deliver you where you want to go safely. Cruise better hunker down and be ready for every reporter to be wanting to get into trouble! And the rest of will have to be patient as this works its way through our system.