![]() The robo-taxis-white Chevy Bolts with orange detailing and prominently displayed names such as Poppy, Tostada, and Matcha-work between ten at night and six in the morning, in a circumscribed part of the city that happens to have minimal traffic and few hills, and have a speed limit of thirty miles per hour. In June, the California Public Utilities Commission allowed Cruise to begin charging fares for rides in San Francisco the company’s thirty-car fleet became the first authorized by the state to operate without human drivers in the car. Now there are hundreds of them-a regional oddity that, through pure saturation, is starting to lose its novelty. ![]() During the past few years, they have had a more noticeable presence in the city, showing up en masse, like commuters. Dozens of Waymo cars used to accumulate on a residential street in the Presidio, continuously navigating themselves into an intractable dead end earlier this year, after a driverless Cruise car was pulled over by cops, it took it upon itself to scoot away from the scene, to what a Cruise spokesperson later deemed a “safer” location down the block.Ĭalifornia began allowing and regulating autonomous vehicles in 2012, and at first the cars were primarily found in the suburbs of Silicon Valley, on low-traffic streets close to corporate headquarters. There is something subaquatic about the vehicles, which seem to travel in small schools, and even to live their own lives. Sleek and smooth, they drift languidly through the streets day and night, gathering and processing huge volumes of training data and emitting a low purr. Most of the cars belong to Waymo, an Alphabet subsidiary, or Cruise, a subsidiary of General Motors. (New York City recently approved a modest fleet of about a half-dozen.) But San Francisco is full of such vehicles, and has been for some time. Self-driving cars are not a fixture of most American cities, at least not yet. There is nothing very unusual to see except for the Waymo cars-white, electric Jaguar S.U.V.s, kitted out with sensors and cameras, their rooftop LIDARs spinning. In recent years, owing to procrastination, distraction, or general malaise, I’ve often found myself staring out at it, idly watching the traffic. Formerly known as Army Street, it is a largely charmless artery. The desk where I work in San Francisco overlooks Cesar Chavez Street, a four-lane thoroughfare that starts at the eastern edge of the city, in the Bayview, and runs west at a jag for about three miles.
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