Cruise is one of the two services (the other one being Waymo) currently operating in San Francisco, California that are offering a ride hailing service catered for by self-driving vehicles. The GM subsidiary was the first of its kind in SF and by that we mean its vehicles were the first to drive autonomously around the city, without a safety driver on-board.
And in case you wondered what would happen if the police pulled a driverless Cruise vehicle over, well, we found a video that shows just such a situation. There’s little background as to what happened right before Instagram user @b.rad916, but it was said that the police may have wanted to pull the driverless vehicle over because it did not have its lights on (even though it was night time).
What’s interesting is that after initially being pulled over right ahead of an intersection, the autonomous vehicle chose to drive on and find a safer place to stop, which was immediately after the junction. The police officers that dealt with the situation looked a little perplexed, but they appear to have been aware what it was they were looking it.
Cruise acknowledged the situation on Twitter where it announced it was aware of it and that the police had contacted them via a special number for law enforcement:
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. An officer contacted Cruise personnel and no citation was issued.
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.
It is worth noting that Cruise’s autonomous vehicles are legally allowed to drive at night in San Francisco, so they do turn on their lights when it gets dark out; this particular vehicle’s lights didn’t appear to be on when it was stopped by the police, so it may have been a malfunction that kept them off.
