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A masked assailant winds up to swing at a Cruise autonomous vehicle at the intersection of Haight St. and Buchanan St. in San Francisco on Sunday, Sept. 10, 2023. Photo courtesy of Catery Villela
San Francisco’s backlash against Cruise’s autonomous vehicles has taken on a new and violent tone.
A person clothed in all black smashed one of the company’s cars with a hammer in the Lower Haight, according to a video obtained by SFGATE. San Francisco Police Department Sergeant Kathryn Winters told SFGATE the incident happened at around 11 p.m. Sunday. Cruise spokesperson Navideh Forghani said the car was empty.
The video, which Lower Haight resident Catery Villela told SFGATE she filmed from her dining room window, shows one of Cruise’s ubiquitous driverless cars standing still in the intersection of Haight Street and Buchanan Street. The front hood of the car appears to be spray-painted, and the masked person is seen repeatedly slamming a hammer into the car’s roof-mounted equipment. They move on to hitting the car's front window before whacking again at the gear on top of the car.
The car seemed to take the beating well; the front windshield cracked but didn’t break, and the sensor equipment atop the car appeared difficult for the person to destroy. At one point in the video, the assailant covered their eyes while flailing at the car. After a little over half a minute of recorded smashing, the person appeared to run off.
Stuart Schuffman, also known as the blogger Broke-Ass Stuart, first shared the video on Instagram and X (formerly known as Twitter) after one of Villela’s friends sent it to him.
“We are deeply troubled by the behavior displayed by the individual,” Forghani told SFGATE. “While there was no one in the vehicle at the time, our priority is to operate safely under all conditions. We have reported the incident to law enforcement and hope they are able to identify those responsible and hold them accountable.
Winters told SFGATE that the person fled the scene before officers arrived, and that an investigation has been opened.
The attack comes less than a week after Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt spoke up for his driverless car fleet in an interview with the Washington Post, where he called the negative media attention on his cars “sensationalized.”
It isn’t the first time city residents have taken matters into their own hands to stop the vehicles from driving. SFGATE reported that firefighters broke a window to stop a Cruise car from driving through an emergency scene in January, and in July, an activist group went viral for topping Cruise and Waymo cars with traffic cones.
Hear of anything happening at Cruise or another tech company? Contact tech reporter Stephen Council securely at stephen.council@sfgate.com or on Signal at 628-204-5452.