Not all robotaxi crashes must be reported
A severe crash on Oct. 2 involving a Cruise robotaxi led to the California Department of Motor Vehicles’ immediate suspension of the company’s driverless vehicles in San Francisco. However, the incident is noticeably missing from the list of autonomous vehicle collisions reported to the state regulator.
Why?
The short answer: In California, AV companies are required to report to the DMV any collisions involving their driverless cars only if they happened while companies were testing the technology. That means, any collision that happens while a fully driverless robotaxi is transporting paying customers doesn’t have to be reported to the state.
San Francisco officials say that subtle distinction makes it difficult to understand the full extent of crashes in the city involving robotaxis, particularly when they’re operating commercially. At a San Francisco County Transportation Authority discussion Tuesday, which unfolded shortly after the DMV’s announcement of Cruise’s suspension, city officials questioned whether robotaxi companies are cherry-picking which collisions they choose to report to the state.
“In commercial deployment, filing crash reports with the state is essentially voluntary,” Julia Friedlander, San Francisco
Municipal Transportation Agency’s senior manager of automated driving policy, told city supervisors. “I think it’s possible that some companies are making the decision to file reports sometimes and not necessarily file reports at other times.”
The DMV did not respond to questions from the Chronicle on Wednesday inquiring how many of Cruise’s collision reports were reported voluntarily.
A Cruise spokesperson said the company complies with all required reporting from its state and federal regulators and regularly communicates with them about incidents. The spokesperson, however, wouldn’t say to what extent, if at all, the company is voluntarily reporting collisions to the DMV.
At Tuesday’s transportation authority meeting, city officials vying to halt robotaxis’ expansion questioned whether the DMV’s collision reporting requirements — implemented in 2018 before the companies logged any fully driverless activity — may be resulting in skewed pictures of AV collisions.
The 100 or so collisions Cruise has reported to the DMV in the past two years illustrate a history of mostly low-speed accidents resulting in no injuries. Some collisions are as mundane as an errant skateboard on the street causing minor damage to a robotaxi. In many of them, the company reported that the collisions were initiated by humans.
Some DMV collision reports submitted by Cruise note the involved robotaxi was in the process of transporting passengers. This includes an Oct. 6 collision with no reported injuries — four days after the consequential downtown San Francisco crash — in the Lower Haight in which Cruise said a human driver hit one of its robotaxis backing out of a driveway.
While the DMV’s regulations might offer AV companies leeway to selectively disclose collisions, the DMV’s reports don’t make clear whether the collision was one that companies had to report or chose to report.
The batch of collisions Cruise has reported to the DMV includes an Aug. 18 incident at Mission and 26th streets where a company robotaxi was struck by a motorist in a Dodge Charger that was running a red light.
Not included in the DMV’s reports: A collision the day before where Cruise said one of its driverless taxis was hit by a fire truck responding to an emergency in the Tenderloin. Cruise said at the time that the passenger in the robotaxi was taken to a hospital “for what we believe are non-severe injuries.”
The DMV began its Cruise investigation the day after the fire truck collision, which happened a week after a separate regulator, the California Public Utilities Commission, allowed the company and rival Waymo to charge for driverless rides in the city at all hours.
The DMV alleges that Cruise withheld footage of the Oct. 2 crash, where a robotaxi ran over and pinned a pedestrian after she was first struck by a human hit-and-run driver. Cruise denies the allegation and said it proactively shared complete footage of the crash with regulators.
The DMV’s suspension of Cruise’s deployment permit — a prerequisite for commercial operation — also automatically triggered the suspension of Cruise’s CPUC permits that allowed the company to charge for rides.
“If the DMV reinstates the deployment permit, the CPUC will evaluate whether to reinstate the passenger permit, based on Cruise’s proposed passenger safety plan,” CPUC spokesperson Terrie Prosper said.
Cruise’s Aug. 18 fire truck collision, as well as the Oct. 2 severe crash, are captured in company disclosures to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, a federal regulator of self-driving cars that has different reporting requirements from the DMV.
While San Francisco officials want more state and local oversight of self-driving cars, California’s rules are relatively stringent compared with other states where the technology operates with little to no regulation.
Still, city officials say the fragmented nature of what AV companies have to report, and to whom, hinder them from definitively answering basic questions, including whether there are any disparities between Cruise and Waymo’s operations.
“Everything conspires to make it as hard as possible, we think, for anybody in the public to understand and get a full picture” of robotaxis’ performance, said Tilly Chang, the transportation authority’s executive director.