Autonomous cars are free to roll in San Francisco. The first weekend was a doozy

The timing couldn’t have been more poetic.

On Thursday, the California Public Utilities Commission voted to give GM’s Cruise and Alphabet’s Waymo carte blanche to set their driverless cars loose on the streets of San Francisco, ferrying paying passengers around town just like any other taxi or ride-hailing service.

In what the Verge described as a contentious six-and-a-half-hour hearing last week, supporters and critics of the plan argued about the supposed benefits or dangers of the move. In the end, the robots prevailed, with CPUC commissioners voting 3-to-1 in favor of the resolution. (It’s worth noting that one of the three commissioners who voted in favor, John Reynolds, served as managing counsel at Cruise until January 2022. According to the Verge, Reynolds decided there had been a sufficient “passage of time” to allow him to vote.)

While driverless cars have been a feature in San Francisco for years, until now they’ve operated as tests, with various rules limiting where and when they operate, and who can ride in them.

And the first weekend of driverless car freedom was a doozy.

By Saturday, the cars were everywhere. I personally encountered more than a dozen Cruise cars, all without drivers in the front seat, within a span of five minutes while I was on a short jaunt in my part of town.

On Friday morning, residents read a ribald tale in the San Francisco Standard about thrillseekers apparently using the driverless cars to rev up their sex lives. The story quoted a libidinous fellow named “Alex” who claims to have performed his coitus in motu no fewer than three times in autonomous cars (oddly, for reasons unexplained, Alex only chooses Cruise cars for his trysts, never Waymo).

As these robotaxis become a common part of the city’s transportation fabric, San Francisco residents may wonder, not unreasonably, what kind of steps the companies have taken to ensure that their chaperone-free vehicles don’t expose unwary passengers to leftover liquids, fumes, or other matter—though anyone who’s waited for a train at a BART station is probably accustomed to such hazards.

But things got really jammed up in North Beach as well as near Golden Gate Park, where the Outside Lands music festival was in full force over the weekend. About ten Cruise cars were “paralyzed” on two narrow streets in North Beach on Friday night according to videos and news reports. Several miles away, near the music festival, several stalled autonomous cars snarled traffic, causing disruptions for those trying to leave the concert. According to the Standard, a police officer was able to take control of one of the stalled Cruise cars and drive it out of the way but was unable to get control of the other autonomous cars. Ultimately the street had to be closed.

Cruise told the Standard that the “large festival posed wireless bandwidth constraints causing delayed connectivity to our vehicles. We are actively investigating and working on solutions to prevent this from happening again.”

The big promise of autonomous cars is to reduce the traffic accidents that caused 43,000 deaths in the U.S. last year. It’s a worthy effort. But this weekend’s robotaxi meltdown and the seemingly tainted CPUC vote that enabled it, underscore the need to proceed with caution. No drivers in cars should not mean no supervision.

Here’s what else is going on in tech today.

Alexei Oreskovic

Want to send thoughts or suggestions to Data Sheet? Drop a line here.

NEWSWORTHY

Time for a new Apple Watch. This year's Apple Watch update, expected in September, will be the most minor upgrade in years, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman. But Apple is planning a major overhaul for the watch's ten-year anniversary, to be released in 2024 or 2025. The watch's case will get a redesign, while the wristbands will become magnetic, among other changes. 

Amazon loses key climate endorsement. Amazon was ejected from a United Nations-backed list of companies working towards achieving net-zero carbon emissions. The online retail and web services giant was removed from the Science Based Targets Initiative list because it has failed to set a credible target for lowering its emissions, according to Bloomberg. An Amazon spokesperson told Bloomberg that the company is talking to the group and will also work with other groups to set "science-based targets." 

To fight or not to fight. The cage fight between Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg took another strange turn over the weekend. Musk messaged Zuck and asked if he could swing by so the two could have a spontaneous sparring session in Zuckerberg's backyard octagon ring. Zuck rebuffed the Tesla CEO, telling him it was time for the real fight or nothing at all. How do we know this: Zuck posted a copy of their DMs. Zuck now says it's time to move on—which is probably a good thing for employees and shareholders of Meta and Tesla, given the "key person" risk involved.

ON OUR FEED

"It's not intrinsically a fad or a sign of opportunism that there are suddenly a huge number of startups all doing AI. There were simply a huge number of almost solvable problems that have now become solvable."

—Venture Capital investor and YC Founder Paul Graham in a series of posts on X, the service formerly known as Twitter, regarding the surge of A.I. startups

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT

Paul Graham calls A.I. ‘the exact opposite of a solution in search of a problem’, by Steve Mollman

Tesla restarting its price war in China with new cuts, sending shares of its Warren Buffett–backed competitor down 6%, by Nicholas Gordon

Top physicist says chatbots are just ‘glorified tape recorders,’ and predicts a different computing revolution is ahead, by Christiaan Hetzner

As SoftBank sues IRL for $150 million after startup admitted 95% of its users were fake, VCs stress ‘uncomfortable’ due diligence, by Steve Mollman

Commentary: A.I., a new ‘superhuman’ and the Fourth Industrial Revolution is just the latest revival of Friedrich Nietzsche’s ‘Superman’ concept, by Rachel Shin and Nick Lichtenberg

BEFORE YOU GO

Welcome to Elon University. No, Elon Musk has not started his own university. But that stops no one from assuming students, faculty, and alumni of the North Carolina school are disciples of the Tesla CEO's education.  

As Stephen Pastis reports in this fascinating feature story, the shared name has caused all sorts of confusion. Some say they're embarrassed to wear their Elon University sweaters these days, while others report unsolicited offers from strangers to buy their school garb. On student-led campus tours, the Musk connection is invariably one of the first things people ask about. 

Of course, sharing a name with the world's richest person could have its benefits if it results in financial largesse from the famous tech multibillionaire. Other than posting an April Fool's tweet wearing the school shirt a couple of years ago, Musk has kept his distance from Elon University.