What occurs when police pull over a driverless car?
Who gets a ticket in a driverless car? It turns out no one does, the San Francisco Police learned.
Recently, a pedestrian caught sight of a Cruise LLC autonomous vehicle getting pulled over by San Francisco Police, took video and posted it on Instagram.
The footage posted April 2 shows a cruiser pulling behind the shuttle after pulling it over. As an officer gets out of the police car and walks toward the Cruise vehicle, a voice can be heard saying, “Ain’t nobody in it.”
The officer looks through the driver’s side window and appears to try opening the door, then walks back toward his car. The AV then rolls forward toward a nearby intersection, proceeds through a green light and pulls over on the other side of the intersection with its hazard lights blinking.
The police car pulls up behind the Cruise vehicle and two officers get out. It’s not clear why the autonomous car was pulled over.
The traffic stop occurred two months after Cruise, which is majority-owned by General Motors Co., began offering rides in its autonomous vehicles to the public in San Francisco.
Cruise responded to the video on Twitter, saying the “AV yielded to the police vehicle, then pulled over to the nearest safe location for the traffic stop, as intended. An officer contacted Cruise personnel and no citation was issued.”
The company added it works “closely with the SFPD on how to interact with our vehicles, including a dedicated phone number for them to call in situations like this.”
But since the industry is still the early stages of deploying self-driving vehicles, there’s not really standardized procedures, specifically at the federal level, for how first responders should deal with AVs.
“Now is probably the time when we should be having this conversation,” said Sam Abuelsamid, principal research analyst leading Guidehouse Insights.