Los Angeles won’t be getting self-driving taxis quite yet.
The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) has put a pause on self-driving car company Waymo’s plans to expand its autonomous taxi service in the state.
The announcement comes a week after Waymo admitted that not one but two of its self-driving taxis crashed into the very same truck in Arizona back in December.
Waymo, which is owned by Google‘s parent company Alphabet, has had fully autonomous taxis operating in San Francisco since 2022, alongside rival Cruise.
The company had requested permission to deploy its fleet of driverless taxis beyond San Francisco in the Bay Area, as well as in Los Angeles.
But as of Wednesday, the CPUC has suspended that plan for at least 120 days.
On Tuesday, Johan Forssell, Swedish Minister for International Development Cooperation and Foreign Trade, took a ride in a fully autonomous Waymo taxi in San Francisco. The next day, California regulators nixed the company’s plan to expand.
An array of cameras on the exterior of Waymo’s autonomous taxis are supposed to prevent accidents. But at least two have been involved in crashes recently.
‘Since Waymo has stalled any meaningful discussions on its expansion plans into Silicon Valley, the CPUC has put the brakes on its application to test robotaxi service virtually unfettered both in San Mateo and Los Angeles counties,’ San Mateo County Board of Supervisors Vice President David J. Canepa told television station KTVU in a statement.
‘This will provide the opportunity to fully engage the autonomous vehicle maker on our very real public safety concerns that have caused all kinds of dangerous situations for firefighters and police in neighboring San Francisco.’
Nobody was in the cars at the time of the Arizona crash in December, according to the company.
The cars’ camera sensors had allegedly misjudged the truck’s location – twice.
Waymo issued a recall last week when it announced the findings in a blog post.
The company blamed the tow truck for having its towed pickup truck improperly secured.
Another Waymo car, this one with a driver behind the wheel but in autonomous mode, killed a dog in June of last year.
In the first quarter of 2023, there were 87 traffic incidents involving Waymo and General Motors-owned Cruise.
And earlier this month during Lunar New Year celebrations, San Franciscans torched a Waymo taxi with fireworks.
The driverless car had gotten ‘confused’ by revelers’ fireworks and came to a standstill in the middle of the road, where it refused to budge.
Locals torched this Jaguar owned by Waymo on February 10 during Lunar New Year celebrations in San Francisco
The car came to a dead stop, blocking the road, after getting ‘confused’ by fireworks. The windows were smashed, and fireworks were thrown in
An angry crowd set the car ablaze.
Nobody was inside as a rowdy throng of people smashed the windshield before one person chucked fireworks inside.
Partly a senseless act of vandalism, the incident also highlighted the city’s simmering hostility to the autonomous vehicles, which many locals say have been deployed before they are safe.
Leaders from San Mateo and San Francisco, including Canepa, wrote letters of protest to the CPUC last week after learning that Waymo planned to expand its coverage.
A similar suspension happened before Waymo was eventually allowed to launch in San Francisco, though, so this may not be the end of the saga.
On February 7, a Waymo driverless taxi struck a bicyclist in San Francisco.
