California clears way for driverless taxis in San Francisco

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San Francisco is set to become the first US city where driverless taxis without humans behind the wheel are free to roam the streets and carry paying passengers without restriction, following a landmark decision by California regulators on Thursday.

The California Public Utilities Commission gave the green light to full commercial robotaxi services in the city despite objections from San Francisco officials who claimed the vehicles have not been proven safe and from unions protesting against the threat to jobs.

Driverless cars are being tested in a handful of other US cities, including Phoenix, Los Angeles and Dallas, but full approval to operate in San Francisco marks the first step to commercialising full services across the country.

Thursday’s 3-to-1 vote by the agency’s commissioners will allow Waymo and Cruise, which are majority-owned by Alphabet and General Motors, respectively, to operate driverless taxis in San Francisco without restrictions. Cars from both companies without safety drivers behind the wheel are already visible on the city’s streets, but until now they have been limited in where and when they can operate and whether they can carry paying passengers.

Prashanthi Raman, vice-president of global government affairs at Cruise, called the decision a “historic industry milestone” that would put the company in a position to “to compete with traditional ridehail, and challenge an unsafe, inaccessible transportation status quo”.

The breakthrough decision comes 14 years after Google began to develop the first driverless cars, leading to widespread predictions that autonomous vehicles would become ubiquitous within a decade.

Despite spending across the industry on development, which McKinsey estimates at $50bn, commercialisation of the technology has been delayed by the difficulty of teaching the cars to deal with the many rare “edge cases” that can occur on the road and which are not covered by their training data.

San Francisco’s transit authorities and the mayor’s office called on the utilities commission to delay approval, arguing that more time was needed to show the vehicles were safe and to put a system in place to monitor the driverless services.

The authorities pointed in particular to instances where driverless cars stalled in city intersections and blocked traffic, forcing the vehicles’ owners to go in person to move them.

The companies argued the city had no grounds to object since they had met all the requirements that state regulators had laid out, including satisfying driverless car rules from the California Department of Motor Vehicles.