A driverless Cruise car named Butternut Squash arrives to pick up a reporter on Aug. 19.
Danielle Echeverria/The Chronicle
By
Updated
Two stalled driverless taxis blocked an ambulance carrying a critically injured patient in San Francisco on Aug. 14, causing a delay that contributed to “poor patient outcome” — the person died 20 to 30 minutes after reaching the hospital, according to a report by San Francisco firefighters that the taxi company disputes.
The report was obtained by Forbes, which recently published a story detailing accounts by San Francisco firefighters who say driverless taxis have repeatedly interfered with their emergency response.
However, Forbes also reported that Cruise provided a video that disputed SFFD’s account of the Aug. 14 incident. The video, Forbes reported, shows that one Cruise car quickly left the scene while the other remained stalled at the intersection with an open lane to its right, which traffic was passing through. Forbes said it was not clear from the video if the ambulance could have navigated into the open lane.
Hannah Lindow, a Cruise spokesperson, told the Chronicle that the Cruise vehicle that stopped did so to yield to first responders directing traffic.
“Throughout the entire duration the (autonomous vehicle) is stopped, traffic remains unblocked and flowing to the right of the AV. The ambulance behind the AV had a clear path to pass the AV as other vehicles, including another ambulance, proceeded to do,” Lindow said in an email. “As soon as the victim was loaded into the ambulance, the ambulance left the scene immediately and was never impeded from doing so by the AV.”
The firefighters’ report on the Aug. 14 incident said first responders arrived at Seventh and Harrison Streets at 10:50 p.m. to treat a pedestrian who had been struck by a vehicle and was found in the left lanes of Harrison Street suffering from life-threatening injuries.
The report said the victim had suffered significant head trauma, was gasping for breath and had absent peripheral pulses. First responders were able to apply a tourniquet to the victim’s lower left extremity to stop “life-threatening bleeding.”
The patient was loaded into an ambulance, which, according to the report, was unable to leave the scene because two Cruise robotaxis were blocking two right lanes on Harrison Street. The report said San Francisco police officers tried unsuccessfully to manually move the cars.
Firefighters then asked an SFPD officer to move his vehicle, which had also been parked in a lane on Harrison Street, to allow the ambulance to leave the scene but that further delayed patient care, according to the report.
“These delays caused by (2) autonomous vehicles blocking a normal egress route from the scene, contributed to a poor patient outcome, delaying the definitive care required in severe trauma cases,” the report said. “The patient was pronounced deceased at SFGH (San Francisco General Hospital) approximately 20-30 minutes after arrival due to severe blunt force trauma.”
Lindow noted that the vehicle that caused the emergency in the first place was driven by a human.
According to Forbes, SFFD has had 74 incidents involving robotaxis, 52 of which were Cruise vehicles.
Emergency responders are gathering information about how long the cars were stopped and how much the ambulance was delayed, the report said.