Residents and city officials here are increasingly fed up with the self-driving cars that have blanketed the city, as they run into issues from getting stuck in wet concrete to colliding with a firetruck. But in an interview with The Washington Post, the CEO of the driverless car company Cruise said much of the angst should just be chalked up to anti-robot bias. “Anything that we do differently than humans is being sensationalized,” Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt said. Cruise’s driverless vehicles — part of a mass experiment on San Francisco’s streets that has drawn mixed results and some protests from city leaders — have recently been dinged by state regulators, who opened an investigation last month into a spate of “concerning incidents involving Cruise vehicles in San Francisco.” While the California Department of Motor Vehicles works on its investigation, it ordered the company to reduce its fleet size in San Francisco by 50 percent — a major setback for the General Motors-owned company. Vogt said it is an “appropriate cautionary action” for officials to take a closer look at some incidents. But overall, he said, much of the scrutiny on driverless cars is overblown. “No one has ever been seriously hurt across several million miles of driving and hundreds of thousands of rides provided in San Francisco,” he added. Cars without drivers have become a common sight in San Francisco, where the winding, hilly and often foggy streets have proved a challenging test ground for the technology. All eyes have been on San Francisco’s rollout of self-driving cars, one of the biggest test cases for a world where many companies — from Amazon to Google — envision a driverless future.

Full story : Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt attributes angst over driverless cars to anti-robot bias, saying “anything that we do differently than humans is being sensationalized.”