San Francisco asked California regulators to halt or scale back the expansion of Cruise and Waymo, after repeated incidents with stopped and idle robotaxis

SAN FRANCISCO — San Francisco is trying to slow the expansion of robotaxis after repeated incidents in which cars without drivers stopped …

NBC News 2023-01-29 David Ingram

Context & Ripple Effects

San Francisco's petition to California regulators is the opening move in a year-long fight over who sets the pace of robotaxi deployment. The city's complaint centered on repeated incidents of stopped and idle driverless cars, and its core grievance was procedural as much as safety-driven: when regulators weighed the 24/7 permit that summer, city officials had no formal say.

The state sided against the city — regulators green-lit round-the-clock operation for both companies — but the incident record kept compounding. By August, the same stopped-car failures were causing traffic jams and obstructing emergency vehicles, eroding public trust, and the DMV moved from permits to enforcement.

First-order effects

Cruise and Waymo face a regulator now formally weighing their expansion requests against a documented failure log rather than pilot-period promises, while San Francisco forces the question of municipal standing into every future hearing.

Second-order effects

Enforcement followed quickly: the DMV ordered Cruise to halve its fleet amid probes into 'recent concerning incidents', and separately delayed Waymo's application to expand into Los Angeles and the peninsula — turning the city's complaint into a statewide brake on both operators.

Third-order effects

If the pattern holds, robotaxi scaling becomes gated by incident-response credibility rather than technology readiness — fleets sized down, expansion applications queued behind investigations — and municipalities push for a formal seat in state permitting decisions they currently lack.

The trend: Autonomous vehicle deployment is shifting from a state-permit race to an accountability contest, where each cluster of street-level failures converts directly into fleet cuts, delayed expansions, and demands for local oversight.

Discussion

@aniccia John Berry on x
Buried the lede: last week, San Francisco firefighters had to shatter a front window of an uncrewed Cruise AV to stop it from interfering with them fighting a major fire in the Western Addition These robot “drivers” are way too dangerously unintelligent. https://www.wired.com/...
@tsimonite Tom Simonite on x
Three times since December, GM's driverless car unit Cruise called 911 in San Francisco because a passenger had become “unresponsive.” Each time, police and firefighters found the passenger had simply fallen asleep. The city says that wasted public funds. https://www.wired.com/..…
@aarianmarshall Aarian Marshall on x
icymi, yesterday we published on a new letter from a clearly frustrated trio of SF agencies. They say the driverless vehicles operated by Cruise and Waymo are jamming up traffic, creating dangerous road situations, delaying public transit, and uh this https://www.wired.com/... ht…
@nbcnews @nbcnews on x
San Francisco is trying to slow the expansion of robotaxis after repeated incidents in which cars without drivers stopped and idled in the middle of the street for no obvious reason. https://www.nbcnews.com/...
@david_ingram David Ingram on x
Cruise and Waymo are racing to deploy more robotaxis in San Francisco. The city wants them to hit the brakes. https://www.nbcnews.com/... via @nbcnews
@wiredscience @wiredscience on x
City agencies say the incidents and other disruptions show the need for more transparency about the vehicles and a pause on expanding service. https://www.wired.com/...

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