Two autonomous vehicles belonging to Cruise LLC, a unit of General Motors Co., are alleged to have delayed an ambulance in San Francisco on Aug. 14, with the patient later dying in hospital.

The incident, which Cruise disputes, allegedly involved two Cruise autonomous vehicles that were stopped in two right-hand lanes on a four-lane, one-way street where the victim was found after an apparent collision by another car, according to a San Francisco Fire Department report reported Saturday by the New York Times. It’s alleged that a police vehicle in another lane then had to be moved to allow the ambulance to leave.

The report claims that the driverless vehicles delayed transport and medical care, with the victim later pronounced dead 20 to 30 minutes after arriving at the Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital.

Cruise has denied the report, showing footage that one of the vehicles had left the scene before the victim was loaded into the ambulance and the other vehicle stopped in the right-hand lane until the ambulance left. Footage is also said to have shown other vehicles, including another ambulance, passing by the right-hand side of the remaining Cruise vehicle.

“As soon as the victim was loaded into the ambulance, the ambulance left the scene immediately and was never impeded,” the spokesperson for Cruise told the Times. The footage also shows that the ambulance passed the Cruise vehicle 90 seconds after the patient was loaded. A police officer did speak to Cruise employees through remote assistance and the company navigated the vehicle away from the scene after the ambulance had left.

The incident occurred several days after Cruise and Waymo LLC were given authorization to offer paid autonomous taxi trips in San Francisco by the California Public Utilities Commission. Both companies had previously been trialing the service.

Whether the incident was actually an incident or not comes amid a growing backlash against autonomous vehicles in San Francisco, including activist groups placing traffic cones on autonomous vehicles to disable them. According to an NPR report in August, a group called “Safe Street Rebel” is behind the so-called “coning” campaign to incapacitate the driverless cars roaming San Francisco’s streets to protest against the city being used as a testing ground for the technology.

The San Francisco Fire Department claims that there have been more than 70 cases of autonomous vehicles interfering with emergency responders. Consequently, some city officials have protested against the expansion of autonomous vehicle services, saying that the number of incidents is much higher than claimed because companies are only required to report collisions to regulators, not other incidents.

Photo: Cruise