Wet concrete.....

Cruise vehicle gets stuck in wet concrete while driving in San Francisco

By Joshua Bote

A Cruise vehicle got stuck in wet concrete driving around San Francisco’s Western Addition Tuesday afternoon.

Paul Harvey, a San Francisco resident who lives in the area, told SFGATE in an interview that he saw the car stuck at a construction site on Golden Gate Avenue between Fillmore and Steiner Streets. The car had no passengers inside.

“I can see five different scenarios where bad things happen and this is one of them,” Harvey told SFGATE. “It thinks it’s a road and it ain’t because it ain’t got a brain and it can’t tell that it’s freshly poured concrete.”

He later saw people pulling the vehicle out and onto the road. A Cruise spokesperson confirmed to SFGATE that Cruise workers removed the vehicle from the concrete, and the vehicle has since been recovered by the company.

Though he’s a skeptic of driverless cars, Harvey acknowledged one of the key marketing points brought up by Cruise and Waymo in the days leading up to the vote: Human drivers are prone to making errors.

“When a light turns green at a traffic light, I just don’t jump on the accelerator,” he said. “I look left and right for some idiot who’s gonna run the light. It does happen.”

But he’s still skeptical of the autonomous vehicles, which he described as “creepy.”

The company’s vehicles were hit hard by an onslaught of Outside Lands attendees last weekend; in North Beach, a slew of vehicles were unable to be re-routed because of “wireless connectivity issues,” while a viral TikTok clip showed a Cruise vehicle stuck on a key intersection just outside of Golden Gate Park. 

Last Thursday, the California Public Utilities Commission voted 3-1 to expand Cruise and Waymo’s services in San Francisco. A spokesperson for Waymo told SFGATE that it has 100,000 people on its waitlist for San Francisco service and will let them access the service in coming weeks.