Incident 389: Cruise Autonomous Car Blocked Fire Truck Responding to Emergency

Description: A fire truck in San Francisco responding to a fire was blocked from passing a doubled-parked garbage truck by a self-driving Cruise car on the opposing lane which stayed put and did not reverse to clear the lane.

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Alleged: Cruise developed and deployed an AI system, which harmed San Francisco firefighters and San Francisco Fire Department.

Incident Stats

Incident ID
389
Report Count
4
Incident Date
2022-04-05
Editors
Khoa Lam
Applied Taxonomies
MIT

MIT Taxonomy Classifications

Machine-Classified
Taxonomy Details

Risk Subdomain

7.3. Lack of capability or robustness

Risk Domain

  1. AI system safety, failures, and limitations

Entity

AI

Timing

Post-deployment

Intent

Unintentional

An Autonomous Car Blocked a Fire Truck Responding to an Emergency
wired.com · 2022

On an early April morning, around 4 am, a San Francisco Fire Department truck responding to a fire tried to pass a doubled-parked garbage truck by using the opposing lane. But a traveling autonomous vehicle, operated by the General Motors s…

GM Autonomous Car Blocked A Fire Truck In San Francisco That Was Responding To An Emergency
carscoops.com · 2022

Early last month, a fire truck on its way to an emergency was prevented from moving forward, in part, by a Cruise AV test vehicle. This is one of a handful of incidents giving San Francisco city officials pause as a proposed permit program …

Protest of Cruise LLC Tier 2 Advice Letter
sfmta.com · 2023

Emergency Responder Incidents

In San Francisco comments on the Draft CPUC Resolution to approve the Cruise initial advice letter, San Francisco informed the Commission of an incident on April 5, 2022 when a Cruise AV stopped in a travel lan…

San Francisco police back the fire chief's complaint about robotaxis interfering with first responders
latimes.com · 2023

San Francisco is in an uproar over robotaxis’ persistent interference with firefighters, police officers and other emergency medical personnel.

The city’s fire chief called attention Thursday to the potentially dangerous encounters between …

Variants

A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.

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