Robo-Cars Stalked My Bike Ride. Then It Got Weirder

Someone at the back of the ride had a mechanical problem, and eventually the news telephone-gamed its way to the front of the pack. Guillermo had dropped his chain—the best-case scenario for not holding everyone up on a long repair job. We coasted to a stop along the side of the narrow residential street to wait, still riding high on what had been a long, fast downhill from north Austin toward our destination, the Capitol building downtown. There was no real rush to get there. We weren’t a road-racing group—just a ragtag crew of spandexed wildcards who like to ride bikes and drink beer in parks every Tuesday night.

A car’s headlights joined the disco of bike blinkies flashing off street signs and trees. “Car back, car back,” several people shouted over a backpack speaker blasting M.I.A.’s “Paper Planes.” I waved the driver forward and edged closer to the curb. Gradually, everyone cleared the center of the road and signaled for the driver to go. The headlights stayed put. For a moment, the compact white car lurched forward. Then it stopped and idled in the road, refusing to pass. I tensed, anticipating a confrontation—a lowered window, some angry words exchanged, or worse. You never know in Texas.

But what happened was even weirder. No one was inside the car. We were shouting and waving at an empty, self-driving vehicle. And it was as confused as we were.

Cruise cars, as they’re known, started their driverless tour of duty in central Austin in December 2022, but this past August seems to be the month they took over our streets. That was when I first saw complaints about their ubiquity on the city’s local subreddit, and a story hyping their ostensible purpose—rideshare, or essentially human delivery—on the local news. The General Motors-owned company launched in 2021 in San Francisco before spreading to Austin and Phoenix. Currently we seem to be participating in a nonconsensual beta test of these robo-vehicles before they roll out to wider use throughout the U.S.

Related: Watch Angry Resident Smash Up Self-Driving Taxi With Hammer

Reps at Cruise claim its fleet of robot taxis is safer than human-driven cars, and for the most part, I believe them. A Cruise car always uses its turn signal. A Cruise car never drinks and drives, nor does it speed—it’s limited to 25 mph, which is why so many of them clog up the same kinds of quiet backroads that cyclists divert to. If you hear of a road rage incident on the news, you can bet your life that it wasn’t initiated by a Cruise car who had a bad day. Because above all, a Cruise car is patient—so patient that it won’t pass a pack of 20 cyclists stalled on an empty residential road until every last one of those cyclists is clear from both lanes.

If that frozen car had been the only Cruise car we encountered on our two-hour ride, it would have been notable, but not too alarming. But we must have passed at least 30 Cruise cars in the five-mile radius around the Capitol—empty Cruise cars passing each other in every lane, Cruise cars that gave up and started idling the second they came within 15 feet of us, Cruise cars that suddenly accelerated in our direction before braking, Cruise cars stacked up four deep behind us at traffic lights, moving as unpredictably as they seemed to think we did. Robot taxis carrying no one on otherwise empty back roads. Without these self-driving cars, we would have had the route to ourselves. So can you blame one of our riders for his very human instinct to antagonize the Cruise cars? Turns out you can quietly disable one by placing a cone on its hood.

But here’s what you also discover when you get close enough to a Cruise car: They’re recording you. The car’s roof rack has a jumble of cameras on it next to a notice that you’re being videotaped by the car. And from what I’ve heard from a bike messenger in San Francisco I know whose friend found out the hard way, the car will turn over evidence to the police if you try to tamper with it. While I have no interest in street-fighting a robot vehicle—I’d like to be thought of as “one of the good ones” when automated tech overthrows humanity—I do resent that just by existing in public, we’re somehow tacitly agreeing to the level of surveillance that hundreds of circling Cruise cars are bringing to our city’s core.

I also would like to know how a Cruise car is programmed to handle the “trolley problem”—would you kill one person to save five?—before I even remotely consider riding in one.

Based on how these cars respond to bikes, I don’t think they’re ready for showtime. But it appears I’ve lost this battle. Five days after my group ride, I did a 5 a.m. group run in a different area of the city, and again was passed by at least 10 empty Cruise cars on what would be an otherwise empty residential road. And that probably won’t even be notable in a few months. Another robo-taxi company just announced that Austin will be its next destination—make way for Waymo.