Alphabet’s Waymo and General Motors’ Cruise are struggling to win over San Francisco residents and officials, a major hurdle in their nationwide expansion.
SAN FRANCISCO—This city’s inhabitants embraced computers, the Internet and cellphones before the rest of the world caught on. They are not so sure about self-driving cars.
Suddenly, orange and white driverless Cruise and Waymo cars seem to be everywhere. Some first responders say they get in the way, and pedestrians fill social media with reports of the cars’ antics. They have collided with at least two pets. An anti-car activist group placed orange traffic cones on the hoods of the vehicles, freezing them in place while creating viral videos of the stunt.
SAN FRANCISCO—This city’s inhabitants embraced computers, the Internet and cellphones before the rest of the world caught on. They are not so sure about self-driving cars.
Suddenly, orange and white driverless Cruise and Waymo cars seem to be everywhere. Some first responders say they get in the way, and pedestrians fill social media with reports of the cars’ antics. They have collided with at least two pets. An anti-car activist group placed orange traffic cones on the hoods of the vehicles, freezing them in place while creating viral videos of the stunt.
San Francisco’s reaction is a preview of the challenges Cruise, majority owned by GM, and Waymo, part of Google parent Alphabet, will face as they expand to cities across the U.S. Both companies have invested billions in driverless cars, hoping they will become massive businesses, and they still need to win hearts and minds.
A city of about 800,000 people, San Francisco has already played host to thousands of self-driving car test miles, and some residents are regular users. Now the companies want to offer ride-hailing businesses that can compete with Lyft and Uber.
If the companies get their wishes, San Francisco will become ground zero for one of the first big urban experiments in transportation using autonomous vehicles. The city, now known for its tech population, has also been a hub for political protest, flower children and fierce guardians of the city’s character.
A Cruise self-driving car on 18th Street in the Castro District of San Francisco. The company has hundreds of cars in the city and is seeking permission from the state to expand its presence and to charge riders for trips at all times of the day.
Photo: Poppy Lynch for The Wall Street Journal
The California Public Utilities Commission, which regulates passenger transportation, is scheduled to vote this month on whether to allow General Motor’s Cruise to expand its presence in San Francisco and to allow it and Alphabet’s Waymo to charge for rides at all times. The vote has been delayed twice, and the agency will hold a hearing next week to hear responses from the companies to a list of safety concerns.
“We think that autonomous vehicles are amazing and we believe that someday they will be safer than human drivers,” said Jeffrey Tumlin, director of transportation for San Francisco’s transit authority. “So far, the industry has not demonstrated that.”
Cruise and Waymo are fighting back. Executives at both companies have begun presenting their pitches to the public and government officials with greater urgency, armed with data they say shows the safety benefits of their vehicles.
Cruise Chief Executive Kyle Vogt said in an interview that officials would cause more people to be harmed if they slowed the rollout of self-driving cars, citing company data that linked their increased presence to reduced collisions. Cruise has quintupled the number of cars it has on San Francisco roads since the beginning of the year, Vogt said. Most of its almost 400 vehicles nationwide are in the tech hub.
Photo: Poppy Lynch for The Wall Street Journal
The California Public Utilities Commission, which regulates passenger transportation, is scheduled to vote this month on whether to allow General Motor’s Cruise to expand its presence in San Francisco and to allow it and Alphabet’s Waymo to charge for rides at all times. The vote has been delayed twice, and the agency will hold a hearing next week to hear responses from the companies to a list of safety concerns.
“We think that autonomous vehicles are amazing and we believe that someday they will be safer than human drivers,” said Jeffrey Tumlin, director of transportation for San Francisco’s transit authority. “So far, the industry has not demonstrated that.”
Cruise and Waymo are fighting back. Executives at both companies have begun presenting their pitches to the public and government officials with greater urgency, armed with data they say shows the safety benefits of their vehicles.
Cruise Chief Executive Kyle Vogt said in an interview that officials would cause more people to be harmed if they slowed the rollout of self-driving cars, citing company data that linked their increased presence to reduced collisions. Cruise has quintupled the number of cars it has on San Francisco roads since the beginning of the year, Vogt said. Most of its almost 400 vehicles nationwide are in the tech hub.
“Anything new, especially a technology that comes across as borderline magic, is going to have a lot of questions and create a lot of attention,” Vogt said. “Attention draws controversy.”
Waymo asked riders to write letters to state officials last month. The company might not be able to continue operating in San Francisco, it said, if the state voted “no.”
Cruise took out full-page ads in several newspapers stating, “Humans are terrible drivers,” citing nearly 43,000 crash fatalities from car accidents in the U.S. last year.
For now, Cruise is offering paid rides at night in San Francisco. Waymo doesn’t have the state’s permission to offer paid rides yet, but people can ride in its cars free of charge. Both have waiting lists to get on the apps.
The group behind the traffic cones, Safe Street Rebel, coordinated the stunt as a weeklong protest of Cruise and Waymo’s expansion ahead of the state commission vote. Members trolled the streets wearing gloves and facial coverings, searching for cars in areas where they are frequently spotted such as the streets around the Panhandle park. The cones confused the cars sensors, some of which are placed on their roofs, stopping them in place.
After the state commission moved back its vote, the activists claimed partial credit for the delay and applauded state officials for applying more scrutiny to the expansion plans.
Cruise and Waymo have burned through billions of dollars in their attempts to build on-demand taxi services, which they hope will eventually produce greater profits without the need for human drivers. So far, their businesses have produced minimal revenue.
GM reported $102 million of sales and $3.3 billion of costs and expenses related to Cruise last year. Chief Executive
Mary Barra said in June the company was at the very early stages of a shift to autonomous vehicles, and executives have said the company is targeting as much as $50 billion in annual revenue by the end of the decade.
Waymo has raised more than $5.7 billion in announced funding from Alphabet and outside investors since 2020. Alphabet, which has come under shareholder pressure to reduce spending on Waymo and other speculative ventures, doesn’t separately report on its financial performance.
Mary Barra said in June the company was at the very early stages of a shift to autonomous vehicles, and executives have said the company is targeting as much as $50 billion in annual revenue by the end of the decade.
Waymo has raised more than $5.7 billion in announced funding from Alphabet and outside investors since 2020. Alphabet, which has come under shareholder pressure to reduce spending on Waymo and other speculative ventures, doesn’t separately report on its financial performance.
Amazon.com’s Zoox has also tested its self-driving technology on the streets of San Francisco and is developing a custom, boxy vehicle specially designed for taxi services. The company declined to say when it would begin deploying the cars in the city.
Cruise and Waymo executives condemned the Safe Street Rebel activists who put cones on their cars and uploaded the videos to TikTok. Waymo said it was a form of vandalism. The group later removed the videos.
“This is a moving, multi-ton vehicle. It is not a toy,” Tekedra Mawakana, Waymo’s co-chief executive, said in an interview. The company plans to engage the authorities for help when its cars are vandalized, she added.