![]() ![]() ![]() As such, the city has seen much lower rates of infections and deaths than other dense major cities. San Francisco was one of the first US cities to impose shelter-in-place rules designed to slow the spread of COVID-19. “I believe that it does violate the city’s stay at home order.” “It’s the only way for Cruise to operate during essential business hours. “I believe that it does violate the city’s stay at home order because it’s more than deliveries being done,” a Cruise employee said. The employees said they weren’t upset to be working, but they felt that the company was exploiting a loophole to resume its testing operations before it was allowed. “After that just ‘safety mileage,’” the employee said. Another employee recalled conducting four deliveries in one day. “All other locations are doing MA,” or mileage accumulation, a reference to Cruise’s normal process of driving around the city in autonomous mode collecting data, the employee said. “ majority of my time there was just autonomous miles,” the AVTO said.Īnother Cruise employee said in mid-May that only one facility, located 1201 Bryant Street, was deploying vehicles for the food bank deliveries. During those three days, the employee said they conducted only one delivery. One Cruise employee told The Verge they volunteered to go back to work delivering meals as an autonomous vehicle test operator (AVTO) for three days in May. Of the company’s four vehicle depots in San Francisco, at most two were deploying AVs for food deliveries throughout May the other two were sending out vehicles for regular AV testing, according to two current Cruise employees and three former ones, all of whom requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak. “We had paused on-road testing to be safe due to the worsening COVID situation at the time,” Cruise said in an email announcing the program, “and had a fleet of all-electric, self-driving cars just sitting around - we thought this was a great way to put them to good use.”īut meal deliveries weren’t the only mission. #DRIVER SAN FRANCISCO MORE CARS MOD DRIVERS#Engineers, developers, and backup drivers were told to stay at home, as the city’s shelter-in-place order made public road testing impossible.īut the company found a philanthropic loophole that would allow it to spring some of its vehicles out of pandemic-imposed dormancy. The pandemic had forced the company, a subsidiary of General Motors, to halt its operations in mid-March. In late April, Cruise announced that it would be redeploying some of its autonomous vehicles to help make deliveries for a pair of food banks in San Francisco. Cruise’s self-driving cars are back on the road in San Francisco, but the company may be skirting the city’s shelter-in-place rules in its rush to get there, some of the company’s backup drivers say. ![]()
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