A bizarre video has captured the moment a driverless car appeared to speed off after being pulled over by police in San Francisco.
The cellphone footage, posted online on 2 April, shows a police car stopping the Cruise car as it is driving at night without headlights on.
The Cruise car initially pulls over and stops at the side of the road and the police car stops behind it.
An officer exits the police cruiser and walks toward the driver’s side door, apparently unaware that there is no human driver behind the wheel.
“Ain’t nobody in it. This is crazy,” a voice is heard saying.
The unusual stop takes an even weirder turn when the officer goes to return to his vehicle.
At that moment, the driverless car takes off, driving across an intersection, before coming to a stop again to laughter of bystanders.
“Are you serious? How does that happen?” one bystander is heard saying.
“Oh my god, I have to watch this.”
The police car once again follows the car and, this time, two confused officers get out and stand around the driverless car.
Video of the encounter went viral on social media, leading Cruise - a subsidiary of General Motors - to defend its technology and insist that its vehicle acted “as intended”.
“Chiming in with more details: our AV yielded to the police vehicle, then pulled over to the nearest safe location for the traffic stop, as intended,” the company commented on Twitter.
It added that an officer had contacted Cruise and no citation was issued over the incident.
“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,” the company added.
The incident marks just the latest confusion sparked by driverless cars on the streets of San Francisco.
In October, residents of a normally-quiet dead-end street in the Richmond District of the city said their road had become overrun by as many as 50 Waymo vehicles which were turning up the street only to have to make multi-point turns to get out
Some locals said the vehicles were turning up and down the street every five minutes and compared the noise to “a spacecraft outside my bedroom window“.
