Sometime late Thursday evening, a Cruise car was involved in a dangerous accident inside SF’s Mission District neighborhood — hours after an earlier crash in the Tenderloin involving another Cruise vehicle and a fire truck engine.
According to eyewitnesses, the self-driving Cruise car suddenly stopped in the middle of the road yesterday, causing an oncoming gray vehicle to swerve off the road onto a nearby sidewalk.
driverless car crash at 26th and mission.
witnesses tell me the gray car had a green light on mission st and the cruise vehicle just stopped in the middle of the road coming down 26th.
car occupants appear okay. pic.twitter.com/9Q77GMTmZl
— Eleni Balakrishnan (@miss_elenius) August 18, 2023
Per a post on X authored by Eleni Balakrishnan, a police and courts reporter for Mission Local, eyewitnesses alleged that the human-driven gray car was given a green light on Mission Street when the traveling Cruise car suddenly stopped in the middle of 26th Avenue. Both cars appear pretty banged up — the Cruise vehicle’s airbags deployed, and its back bumper was impaled into a crosswalk pole; the gray vehicle, however, was much worse with nearly the entire front part of it crumpled — but apparently, all car occupants were Ok. (It’s unclear if anyone was a passenger inside the Cruise vehicle.)
It’s another gorgeous San Francisco day to almost get ran over by a Cruise car… again. 🥰
— Matt Charnock (@M_J_Charnock) August 17, 2023
Balakrishnan was later informed by a Cruise spokesperson that the self-driving car had a green light and that the gray car “ran a red light at a high rate of speed.” (The latter does make sense, given the shown damage to the gray car.)
Per the autonomous-vehicle company, the Cruise car detected the gray car and hit the brakes moments before the collision; no footage of the incident has been released or made publicly available as of publishing, nor has Cruise issued an official statement on the crash.
A little after 10PM last night one of our cars was in a collision at Polk and Turk St and we wanted to provide an update on what we know at this time. (1/5)
— cruise (@Cruise) August 18, 2023
This car crash between a human-driven vehicle and a self-driving Cruise vehicle happened just hours after a robotaxi operated by Cruise struck a San Francisco fire truck injuring the passenger inside.
The aforenoted crash happened at the intersection of Turk and Polk streets in the city’s Tenderloin district after 10 p.m this past Sunday. Cruise noted on X that one of their cars drove into the intersection on a green light and was struck by an emergency vehicle on the way to an emergency scene — a type of scenario the San Francisco Fire Department noted in its statement against CPUC’s recent expansion of robotaxi programs in SF.
Thankfully, the adult passengers on the Cruise vehicle Thursday suffered minor injuries and are expected to make a full recovery.
Feature image: Courtesy of Mike Cohen (MikeC415@sfba.social) on X
