An Associated Press reporter recalls the first time he took a ride in a car without sitting in the driver’s seat
I won’t forget the first time I took a ride in a car without anyone sitting in the driver’s seat.
It happened one night last September when a Chevy Bolt named Peaches picked me up outside a San Francisco bar. Our ensuing half-hour ride together produced, at first, a titillating display of technology’s promise. Then an unexpected twist made me worry that the encounter had turned into a mistake I would regret.
Peaches and I were getting along great for most of our time together, as the car deftly navigated through hilly San Francisco streets similar to those Steve McQueen careened through during the famous chase scene in the 1968 film “Bullitt.” Unlike McQueen, Peaches never exceeded 30 mph (48 kph) because of restrictions imposed by state regulators on a ride-hailing service operated by Cruise, a General Motors subsidiary, since it won approval to transport fare-paying passengers last year.
It was all going so smoothly that I was starting to buy into the vision of Cruise and Waymo, a self-driving car pioneer spun off from a Google project that is also trying launch a ride-hailing service in San Francisco.
The theory fueling the ambition is that driverless cars will be safer than vehicles operated by frequently distracted and occasionally intoxicated humans — and, in the case of robotaxis, be less expensive and more convenient to ride in than automobiles that require a human behind the wheel.
The concept does sound good. And the technology to pull it off is advancing steadily, just like other artificial intelligence applications such as chatbots that can write college-level essays and produce impressive pieces of art within seconds.
But when something goes awry, as it did near the end of my encounter with Peaches, that sense of astonishment and delight can evaporate very quickly.
And even though none of the Cruise and Waymo driverless vehicles have been involved in major accidents in San Francisco, the robotaxis have been malfunctioning frequently enough to have triggered an intense resistance to proposed expansion that would allow them to operate around-the-clock throughout the city.
