Clearly, they weren’t time traveling to Dallas.
Of course, as the population continues to increase and the supply of flying cars remains at zero, we need more roads and road repairs than ever before. The future is no doubt here, and so too are driverless cars, which were also once merely a hopeful vision for the future. In 2012, a driverless car collaboration between Toyota and Google was licensed in Nevada. Audi, Tesla, Lyft and Uber have each been among the top players in the self-driving game over the past decade as well. Atlanta, Pittsburgh and Detroit are among the cities that have welcomed testing of driverless taxis in recent years. Last year, Dallas was one of the sites for driverless freight truck testing.
Cruise, a subsidiary of GM, has made quite the splash with “robo taxi" programs in San Francisco, Phoenix and Austin. And now Dallas is beginning to see its day in the autonomous vehicle sun thanks to Cruise beginning initial testing here and in Houston back in May.
We’re still a few months away from the fully operational commercial Cruise offering, but a spokesperson for the robo taxi provider told the Observer that it took about three months for Austin’s program to go from testing and mapping to carrying out its first driverless rides, which began around the beginning of this year.
The general concept of driverless vehicles may not be a new one, but the potential problems they can introduce will be new for Dallas police. National headlines were made in 2018 when a woman died after being hit by an Uber self-driving test vehicle in Tempe, Arizona. Cruise found itself in the news that same year when one of its vehicles in San Francisco was pulled over for allegedly not stopping for a person in a crosswalk. The passenger in the back seat was given the ticket.
“Our cars have multiple sensors, lidars and radars that can tell if a police officer has lights on behind it.” – Cruise robo taxi spokesperson
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More recently, Cruise drew less-than-positive attention when a pair of its modified Chevy Bolt electric vehicles stalled in the middle of a busy downtown Austin intersection in July. The company told Austin’s Fox 7 that stopping in that situation was in line with its safety protocol in that “whenever the technology isn’t extremely confident in how to proceed, the car errs on the side of caution instead of forging ahead, coming to a safe stop.”
How will the Dallas Police Department handle issues regarding autonomous vehicles? Is there a plan in place for officers to follow when they need to pull over a Cruise robo taxi, whether it be for safety purposes or for alleged violations such as speeding or running a stop sign?
If there are established protocols to follow already, neither the department nor the city is saying what they are. If anything, the vague answers we received to our very specific questions suggests that Dallas police aren’t yet sure how they will interact with the Cruise robo taxis in instances involving possible infractions.
We reached out to Dallas police with a short list of specific questions targeted at the police response to pulling over a driverless vehicle and were quickly referred to the city’s media contact and attorney’s office. We submitted the same questions to them.
“This is part of the ongoing conversations with city departments regarding autonomous vehicles to ensure all state and local laws are followed,” wrote city of Dallas Manager of Public Information Jennifer Brown in reply to our email. We followed up with an email asking for further clarification, and Catherine Cuellar, the city’s director of communications, outreach and marketing replied via email: “These questions are expected to be addressed in the Transportation Committee in a briefing after the FY24 budget is adopted.”
This is notable, given that the vehicles have been in town for more than three months now, and a Cruise spokesperson has told us the company “hope[s] to have a commercial service up and running by the end of the year. That’s the goal.” We also reached out to City Council member Omar Narvaez, the committee chair for Transportation and Infrastructure, with our questions and to council member Cara Mendelsohn, who now chairs the Public Safety Committee, but did not receive a reply from either.
For its part, Cruise makes it sound as though it won’t be too difficult for police and emergency services to catch the attention of their vehicles when necessary.
“Our cars have multiple sensors, lidars and radars that can tell if a police officer has lights on behind it,” the Cruise spokesperson said. “The car will pull over to a safe space, just like you have all of your life if you’re being pulled over.”
Once an officer has a Cruise robo taxi pulled over, a phone number will be displayed on large tablet screens inside the vehicle for the officer to call and connect with a customer service rep.
But even the many technological innovations each driverless vehicle is equipped with aren’t enough to completely eliminate problems with city emergency services. On Aug. 17, a Cruise robo taxi was involved in a crash with a San Francisco fire truck, resulting in injury to the taxi’s passenger. According to reports, a firefighter claimed that the robo taxi did not properly yield to the fire truck as it was responding to a nearby call.
The San Francisco incident came just a few days after some “city officials called for the suspension of robotaxi rollouts following multiple reports of the vehicles causing traffic issues or interfering with first responders,” according to a CBS San Francisco report.
The passenger of a Cruise robo taxi will have some control over how events proceed. Using an app and certain in-car controls, passengers can alter their route, change their destination and initiate immediate communication with a customer service rep. The spokesperson says these are just some of the steps the company has taken to make a Cruise ride as safe as possible.
The spokesperson said Cruise has been in communication with local authorities regarding safety and compliance. And for all of the accidents or problems that have grabbed headlines, the safety numbers for Cruise riders lean overwhelmingly in the company’s favor, she said.
“There are 40,000 road deaths a year,” the spokesperson said. “As humans, we optimize our driving for ourselves. A robo taxi optimizes for safety. That means they drive the speed limit and don’t drive tired or anything like that. In over 4 million driverless miles Cruise has driven, there have been no major injuries or deaths. That’s pretty substantial.”
