A stalled Cruise robotaxi blocked a San Francisco ambulance from getting a pedestrian hit by a vehicle to the hospital in an Aug. 14 incident, according to first responder accounts. The patient later died of their injuries.
“The patient was packaged for transport with life-threatening injuries, but we were unable to leave the scene initially due to the Cruise vehicles not moving,” the San Francisco Fire Department report, first reported by Forbes, reads. “The fact that Cruise autonomous vehicles continue to block ingress and egress to critical 911 calls is unacceptable.”
And they don’t want the public to start thinking of self-driving cars as mobile, always-on surveillance machines. Not that that’s necessarily the design, it’s just hard to design a self-driving car not to capture vast amounts of footage from cameras mounted all over the car.