A car from GM’s self-driving car unit, Cruise, received a traffic ticket from a San Francisco police officer who said that a Cruise car drove uncomfortably close to a pedestrian. Cruise disputes the officer’s accusation, saying that the vehicle stayed more than 10 feet away from the pedestrian.
The incident was first reported Tuesday by Jackie Ward, a reporter for the local CBS station in San Francisco. She was tipped off by a viewer, Kevin O’Connor, who snapped the above picture of the car being pulled over a few days after a fatal Uber self-driving car crash in Tempe, Arizona.
“According to data collected by Cruise, the pedestrian was 10.8 feet away from the car,” Ward says. The car was in self-driving mode and “it began to continue down Harrison at 14th St. Shortly after the car accelerated, the officer pulled it over.”
Cruise defended the behavior of its vehicle in a statement to the station. “California law requires the vehicle to yield the right of way to pedestrians, allowing them to proceed undisturbed and unhurried without fear of interference of their safe passage through an intersection,” Cruise said. “Our data indicates that’s what happened here.”