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UPDATED: The robots are back and this time, they’re cleaning up [Note: no robots after all]

Posted on by Sarah B.

A driverless street sweeping machine from Cruise Automation, spotted at 38th & Geary on 3/8/18. Photo by Jim C.

Reader Jim C. sent us the pic above of a driverless/automated street sweeping machine that he spotted at 38th and Geary last Thursday.

Jim reports that the vehicle was closely followed by a manned vehicle from Cruise Automation, a San Francisco-based company that is “buildng the world’s best autonomous vehicles to safely connect people to the places, things, and experiences they care about”. Cruise is owned by General Motors.

We emailed the Cruise media department last week to try and find out more about this cleaning machine, but we have not heard back from them.

UPDATE 2:29PM: Cruise confirmed that they are NOT affiliated with the vehicle. We are waiting on confirmation from our reader that the cleaning vehicle was, in fact, driverless.

UPDATE 9:32PM: It looks like the coincidence of a Cruise car near the sweeper and the slow follow-on pace of it may have lead our reader Jim to misread the situation as the Cruise car being an escort (when it fact it was not related to the street sweeper at all). “I couldn’t figure out why it wouldn’t pass the sweeper since all the cameras would see in the forward direction was the back of a truck. It was only then it dawned on me that this wasn’t the usual SF Street Sweeper,” Jim told us. “If a strange coincidental confluence of angle and passing vehicles led me to reach a wrong conclusion about what I saw, I apologize.” Sorry, readers for the futuristic story that didn’t turn out to be true. And apologies to the robots out there, but feel free to clean our streets anytime. 🙂

Sarah B.

4 Comments

  1. Hey this is a regular old street sweeping vehicle and there’s no evidence it’s by cruise who is very public that they’re only testing on chevy bolts at the moment.

  2. @anonymous – Cruise has confirmed to us they are NOT affiliated with the vehicle, so we’re just waiting to talk further with our reader that saw the vehicle.

  3. I think the city has had to buy some narrow sweepers to sweep post- or curb-protected bike lanes. This could be one of those.

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