SAN FRANCISCO — Jess McCuan walked out her door one recent morning to take her dog, Doc, for a walk. Suddenly, a white car zipped through the crosswalk, seemingly oblivious to human and canine alike.
But what really bothered McCuan was the driver. Or the lack thereof. The car belonged to one of the seven companies testing fully autonomous vehicles, or AVs, in California.
“They’re flooding the streets now,” McCuan said. She figures every fifth car she sees in San Francisco lately is self-driving.
It’s quite different here in Boston.
There are far fewer complaints about self-driving cars because you barely see them. Only one company is permitted to test autonomous vehicles here — Boston-based Motional — and it confines its occasional experiments to a corner of the Seaport and a closed track at Suffolk Downs in East Boston. And despite past efforts to woo AV firms, the state hasn’t received any new applications in years.
It’s a striking shift from 2016, when then-governor Charlie Baker and then-Boston mayor Martin J. Walsh launched a push to make the city a crucial development and testing center for the technology.
But following a string of high-profile crashes and the disruption of the COVID pandemic, the state Transportation Department — now under Governor Maura Healey — has seemingly lost its enthusiasm for AVs. Officials say safety, not commercialization, is their top priority, and declined to comment in more detail. So did a spokesperson for Boston Mayor Michelle Wu, referring questions about AV testing to Motional.
Proponents have long said AVs could transform transportation, with all manner of economic and social benefits: high-paying jobs in robotics, manufacturing, and artificial intelligence, and reduced carbon emissions should people forgo private cars for electric robo-taxis. But skeptics abound, particularly in San Francisco, where residents say AVs have caused traffic jams and blocked emergency vehicles.
Either way, for AVs to work properly, the companies building them need real-time driving data so their algorithms can master the nuances of driving on city streets and highways and in all types of weather. That means getting them out on the road.
“Safety is of the utmost importance,” said Seth Winterroth, a San Francisco-based venture capitalist who sits on the board of AV software startup Wayve. “But at the end of the day, you have to go and test the vehicles. And you want an environment that presents a certain degree of complexity.”
With its complex road network, varied weather, and pedestrian-dense streetscapes, Boston would seem like an ideal proving ground for such technology. And — like San Francisco — the city is chock-full of startups and researchers who have already done extensive work in autonomous vehicles and artificial intelligence.
Boston had an early lead. In early 2016, the Toyota Research Institute, the Japanese automaker’s research and development arm, established a major research center in Kendall Square that aimed to work with MIT to help self-driving cars learn from accidents. That same year, Baker issued an executive order that helped pave the way for companies to start testing autonomous vehicles with human backup drivers, a step that local AV firms had hoped would soon lead to commercialization.
Baker also identified autonomous vehicles as one of several high-tech industries crucial to the state’s future. “These are the platforms of the next generation of great companies and new jobs,” he said in 2017.
But after an autonomous Uber vehicle in Arizona killed a pedestrian in 2018, Boston transportation officials asked nuTonomy and Optimus Ride, the two companies the state had granted a permit, to pause testing in the city.
Two years later, the pandemic struck. No one was traveling and autonomous vehicles took a back seat to bigger concerns. Business conditions also shifted, as the nascent industry consolidated and executives realized the complex technology would require additional capital.
With self-driving cars, “everyone always realizes that it takes more time, more thought” than initially anticipated, said Shannon Roberts, associate director of the New England University Transportation Center.
Last year, Optimus Ride shut down its operations and sent a majority of its engineering team to Magna International, a Canadian maker of car mobility technology. Magna did not apply for a new permit to test vehicles in Massachusetts, the Transportation Department said.
Also that year, Toyota pulled its automated driving team out of its research center in Cambridge and folded it into a new mobile technology subsidiary called Woven, said Wendy Rosen, a spokesperson for the Toyota Research Institute. The Cambridge office now primarily focuses on robotics.
NuTonomy is now part of Motional, and though headquartered in Boston, the company’s main focus of late has been Las Vegas and Los Angeles, where it has been working with Uber and Lyft to offer rides and food deliveries.
“The rollout of AVs is going to be an evolution,” said Akshay Jaising, Motional’s vice president of commercialization. “Cities that are more favorable to autonomy will have them first, such as markets with sunny and dry climates, clear regulatory paths, and ample demand.”
Boston is clearly not on that list, which seems perfectly fine with the Healey administration. Massachusetts’ primary goal is to ensure autonomous vehicles are safe and reliable, not help companies generate profits by rushing to market, transportation officials say.
There’s another key difference between Massachusetts and some other states — including California — where autonomous testing is more advanced.
Here, companies seeking to test self-driving cars need the approval of both state regulators and officials in whatever communities where they plan to test. In California, AV firms just need the state Department of Motor Vehicles and the California Public Utilities Commission to sign off; then they “notify” local governments of planned testing in the area.
Those rules significantly ease the path for AV companies, but have created significant friction between the state and cities like San Francisco, where companies like General Motors-owned Cruise and Waymo, a subsidiary of Google, have been testing self-driving cars without humans. Regulators recently approved Cruise and Waymo’s plans to start offering paid taxi service 24/7 throughout the city. Yet, within days of that approval, Cruise agreed to the state’s demand to cut its vehicle taxi fleet in half, at least temporarily, after a series of mishaps, including a car driving into a construction zone and getting stuck in fresh cement and another colliding with a fire truck.
As of mid-August, the California DMV had received 637 collision reports involving AVs since it first allowed testing on public roads in 2018. So far this year, regulators have documented around 70 collisions in San Francisco alone.
Residents and local politicians have complained about autonomous vehicles stalling in the middle of streets, causing traffic jams. Other critics, including San Francisco’s fire chief, say the cars have obstructed ambulances and fire trucks. Activists have even resorted to disabling Cruise and Waymo vehicles by placing cones on their hoods to block their sensors.
So far, California has issued permits to seven companies to test autonomous vehicles without safety drivers and to over 60 automakers and software firms to test self-driving cars with a backup human driver, including Apple, Nissan, Nvidia, Qualcomm, and Tesla, according to state records. In Massachusetts, there’s only Motional, which seems inclined to stick to the Seaport and Suffolk Downs.
“We’re focused on our existing testing and don’t have immediate plans to expand,” a company spokesperson said.
AV expert Heidi Wyle thinks Boston can still lead the technology in one respect. The state should consider creating spaces exclusively for AVs, she said, whether a dedicated lane or a highway underpass/overpass, at least until they’re ready for widespread travel.
“We should segregate them,” said Wyle, founder and CEO of Venti Technologies, a Boston-based startup that’s developing software for industrial AVs for use in ports, factories, and warehouses.
Transportation officials say the state is still open to autonomous vehicles. But for self-driving cars to safely work, they need to practice on live streets, interacting with other vehicles and people, Roberts of the New England University Transportation Center said.
“They can’t just be in a closed area,” she said. “They do need to be on the roads.”
Thomas Lee can be reached at thomas.lee@globe.com.