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Welcome to the future: Watch a driverless car try to evade the cops
Fortunately, it didn’t get too far.
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While it’s likely that we’ll start seeing more and more autonomous vehicles in the next few years, there are obviously still some issues that need to be addressed. One issue arose recently with how Cruise autonomous vehicles handle encounters with cops.
Cruise has been offering automated taxi rides in San Francisco to the public since February. And up until about a week ago, the platform had seemingly no issues at all.
That is until an autonomous Cruise vehicle pulled away from a cop during a traffic stop. Check out the video below posted by Seth Weintraub to see the strange interaction between the Cruise vehicle and the San Francisco police.
The cops pulled over the empty Cruise autonomous vehicle seemingly because it did not have its lights on. After the first cop approaches and realizes there’s no one in the car, the vehicle begins to move forward across an intersection.
Fortunately, the vehicle stopped once again, allowing officers to reassess the situation. You can see many concerned onlookers in the video as this strange event occurs.
Cruise chimed in on the conversation on Twitter, replying that “our AV yielded to the police vehicle, then pulled over to the nearest safe location for the traffic stop.”
That explanation sounds like the autonomous vehicle first thought that the cop car was trying to pass. But then it eventually realized the cops were targeting it.
“We work closely with the SFPD on how to interact with our vehicles, including a dedicated phone number for them to call in situations like this,” Cruise continued in its reply.
It looks like Cruise’s autonomous vehicles need to be better about realizing when cops are pulling them over. Fortunately, no one was hurt in this incident. But who knows what could happen next time something like this happens.
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