Even though Waymo is – thanks to the launch of the robotaxi service – currently getting all the attention, we must not forget that there are other contenders. Today, I had the first time for a long period the time to search for GMCruise vehicles. I found a bunch of them in San Francisco on Harrison Street between 11th and 16th Street and made some recordings. Those were done between. 12:30pm and 13pm local time.

I even encountered at the intersections two or even three GMCruise-vehicles at the same time. Most cars had passengers in the car. GMCruise is testing its robotaxi-service with employees, who are encouraged to use the service for errands of all kinds.

Here are some interesting highlights from the video:

1:16 – At this left turn a vehicle coming from the parking lot of a shopping center is taking the GMCruise car’s right of way, which has the GMCruise car come to a full stop in the middle of the intersection.

2:31 – Autonomously driving GMCruise vehicles seem to keep a larger safety distance to other vehicles. This vehicle is operating autonomously, because in the following video sequence – after I changed the street side – I could observe the following behavior:

3:16 – I zoomed on the safety driver’s hands, and we can see easily that he is not steering the wheel. In the two following GMCruise cars the safety drivers clearly steer the wheel (not easily visible in the video due to the reflection of the sunlight in the side windows) and the safety distance is shorter.

This article was also published in German.