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Is Atlanta ready for driverless cars?

Is Atlanta ready for driverless cars? The Cruise robotaxis are expected to hit Atlanta streets in a matter of months. (WSBTV.com News Staff)
(WSBTV.com News Staff)

ATLANTA — Driverless cars, currently facing scrutiny from government regulators, are on their way to Atlanta.

The Cruise robotaxis are expected to hit Atlanta streets in a matter of months.

Just days after our partners at Channel 2 Actions News tested out the robotaxis in Austin, Texas, Cruise announced it was temporarily adding in-car human supervision back to every driverless car it has on the road.

The move came after a pedestrian was seriously injured in an accident.

“It feels automatically kind of natural,” Channel 2′s Justin Gray said while riding in the robotaxi, noting the obvious exception -- there’s no one in the driver’s seat. “Yeah, absolutely,” Mike Staples, Cruise’s general manager in Austin, replied.

“This is my first trip to Austin. It’s kind of an interesting way to see the city,” Gray added.

At the time of Gray’s test drive, Cruise had about 100 self-driving robotaxis on the road in downtown Austin.

Cruise, owned by General Motors, has already sent vehicles to map Atlanta’s streets.

“Cruise provides a service that’s much like your standard ride-share service. But we do it with autonomous vehicles, and we like to think we do it safer,” Staples said.

The question about safety is a big one.

As previously reported, General Motors’ Cruise autonomous vehicle unit recently recalled all 950 of its driverless cars to update software after an incident last month in San Francisco.

The recall is due to a collision detection subsystem of the Cruise Automated Driving Systems (ADS) software. That software may not respond correctly when a crash happens, according to a notice filed with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and obtained by Reuters.

At the beginning of October, a pedestrian was struck by a hit-and-run driver in San Francisco, Reuters reported. The pedestrian was thrown into a lane of traffic and was hit again by a Cruise robotaxi. That vehicle did not stop in time and ended up dragging the pedestrian, who was critically injured.

The recall is expected to address circumstances involving the collision detection subsystem that may cause the Cruise to try to pull over and out of traffic rather than stay stationary after a crash.

The Cruise system “inaccurately characterized the collision as a lateral collision and commanded the AV to attempt to pull over out of traffic, pulling the individual forward rather than remaining stationary,” the company reportedly said.

In documents posted last week by U.S. safety regulators, General Motors said that once the software is updated, if a similar incident were to happen, the Cruise vehicle will remain stationary. Read more here.

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