(NewsNation) — As autonomous vehicles become increasingly popular in San Francisco, some riders are using the vehicles for an unintended purpose.
Cruise and Waymo, two companies that have been part of the city’s driverless taxi pilot program, have been operating since early 2022. Last week, the city voted to expand their services to offer fully driverless rides 24/7 and increase the number of cars that are on the road.
The San Francisco Standard spoke to four Cruise car riders who said they’ve recently had sex in the driverless vehicles in the city.
“It seems like I’m a trailblazer,” one passenger told the Standard. “It’s also fun to realize that this is like the first place you can do this in the country.”
Rules and regulations surrounding robo-taxis remain vague, considering it’s a new industry. However, Cruise has pretty extensive camera surveillance inside and outside of their cars.
“We record video inside of the car for added safety and support,” Cruise states on its website. “If something happened during your ride, we might review the recording to better understand what happened. We only record audio during active support calls.”
The company told NewsNation it has a dedicated team to investigate suspected incidents that violate company guidelines. The rules also prohibit the use of drugs and consumption of alcohol, but real-time enforcement is a nonfactor since the vehicles are driverless.
Violators face suspension or termination of their accounts.
“I’m not really surprised that that’s happening because if there’s no one else in the car, if there’s no drivers, like, you could basically do anything you want,” San Francisco resident Sherwin Li said in reaction to the reports.
A Waymo spokesperson told The Standard its team might review recordings if there are concerns about cleanliness, safety, crashes or missing items.
“You’re going to be on camera so that’s pretty brave, for sure,” resident Natalie Norton said. “People are going to do what they are going to do, I just hope they’re disinfected for each ride.”
The vote to expand driverless cars on the road in San Francisco came after hours of heated debate. Critics voiced their concerns over claims the technology didn’t recognize things like hand signals from bicyclists, emergency vehicles and some emergency situations. They gave reasons as to why the program needed more time to be perfected and shouldn’t expand.
Researcher Scott Cohen, professor of tourism and transport at the University of Surrey, predicted five years ago that driverless technology would lead to lewd behavior.
“Sex in autonomous vehicles would be inevitable, drunkenness in autonomous vehicles, potentially prostitution in autonomous vehicles, all of these phenomena were to be anticipated,” Cohen said.