A few hours ago the SF Chronicle published a map of crashes that illustrates quite well a failure of driverless cars to deliver safety or reliability.

There are so many simple yet catastrophic failures it’s hard to choose which one will become most popular among the many groups watching and aiming to disrupt transit in major urban areas.

For example an easily predictable congestion of wireless communications led to fleets of cars going into failure mode, stopping and blocking all traffic as if robots staging a protest. SFPD had to be diverted from real work to attend to giant incapacitated and needy robots, ultimately redirecting traffic to other streets that weren’t in crisis.

As many as a dozen stalled Cruise autonomous vehicles blocked streets in San Francisco’s North Beach and near this weekend’s Outside Lands music festival, snarling traffic and frustrating riders barely a day after state regulators voted to allow the unlimited expansion of robotaxi companies.

Social media users posted about one incident late Friday in which about 10 Cruise vehicles appeared to be standing still with their hazard lights flashing, blocking lanes on Vallejo Street near Grant Avenue.

The whole city is vulnerable to sudden remotely controlled shutdowns. But more to the point, the map of crashes shows the robots are failing at basic daily safety before we even get to the phase of trivial targeted wave attacks on them (e.g source code).