It seems that autonomous cars are not going to solve the problem of traffic jams in big cities with this event that just happened in San Francisco.
Autonomous cars are here to stay on our roads, and although they will facilitate mobility and possibly also efficiency, it is clear that they can also end up causing secondary problems such as traffic jams by relying on wireless signals.
And this just happened in San Francisco, where CBS has reported that the maker of autonomous cars Cruise was the cause of a huge traffic jam in San Francisco when 10 of his cars were stopped for more than 15 minutes on the streets after losing their wireless signals.
As many people collect on social networks, you can see videos where several Cruise autonomous cars are seen stopped on the streets of San Francisco with their flashing lights on, and while other vehicles try to pass without success.
The company responsible for the vehicles itself has directly blamed the large music festival that was taking place in the area, arguing that they absorbed all the city’s bandwidth.
“A large festival brought up wireless bandwidth restrictions which caused connectivity delays for our vehicles. We are actively investigating and working on solutions to prevent this from happening again. We apologize to those who were affected.”, points the company.
On the other hand, witnesses of the situation indicated: “It makes me feel horrible because people can die. If there is an emergency, the emergency vehicle cannot pass. They can’t get through those cars“, said jeffrey bilbreyNorth Beach resident.
“I was warning people because people from out of town didn’t know these cars were driverless“, said
On the other hand, the supervisor Aaron Peskin managed to speak with Cruise, noting that they are exploring the creation of their own wireless signal system to avoid this type of occurrence in the future.
However, he points out:That’s not going to happen overnight, but in the meantime they’re deploying hundreds more cars on our streets. They should take a time out and pause until they have perfected this technology in a way where people don’t end up burning to death or getting injured.“.
He adds that there are about 600 cars without a driver between Cruise and Waymo in the city, and claims that there have already been 50 documented incidents.