Incident 253: Cruise's Self-Driving Cars Allegedly Lost Connection to Their Server, Causing Traffic Blockages in San Francisco

Description: Cruise’s autonomous vehicles were shown on video stopping in the middle of the road and causing blockages in San Francisco, as they were disabled allegedly due to lost connection to their company’s server.

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Alleged: Cruise developed and deployed an AI system, which harmed San Francisco traffic participants and San Francisco public.

Incident Stats

Incident ID
253
Report Count
4
Incident Date
2022-05-18
Editors
Khoa Lam

GMF Taxonomy Classifications

Taxonomy Details

Known AI Goal

Autonomous Driving

Potential AI Technology

Image Segmentation, Geolocation Data

Potential AI Technical Failure

Software Bug, Hardware Failure, Backup Failure

Tweet: @sgatz
twitter.com · 2022

A very San Francisco Saturday night. A pack of 3 driverless @Cruise cars got confused and stopped and blocked two lanes of Masonic. The robots will win just by blocking traffic.

Cruise driverless cars blocked traffic for hours Tuesday night
sfexaminer.com · 2022

Cruise’s driverless cars experienced serious issues Tuesday night with as many as 20 of its vehicles standing motionless for about two hours at the corner of Gough and Fulton streets, according to an eyewitness. The incident was only resolv…

GM Cruise Robotaxis Blocked SF Streets More Frequently Than We Knew, One Night ‘Nearly 60’ Cars Stopped
sfist.com · 2022

GM Cruise snafus have blocked SF streets with suddenly immobilized self-driving cars at least three times in the last two months, with one incident where almost 60 vehicles stopped, and another where Cruise “lost touch with its entire fleet…

Cruise’s Robot Car Outages Are Jamming Up San Francisco
wired.com · 2022

Around midnight on June 28, Calvin Hu was driving with his girlfriend near San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park when he pulled up at an intersection behind two white and orange autonomous Chevrolet Bolts operated by Cruise, a subsidiary of Gene…

Variants

A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.