On October 2, a Cruise driverless robotaxi ran over a woman in downtown San Francisco and pinned her under the car, sending her to the hospital with serious injuries.
On Tuesday, state authorities suspended Cruise's operating permit, prohibiting it from deploying driverless vehicles on public roads until safety issues are resolved. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is investigating whether it should also take action.
The turn of events marks a new chapter in the evolution of self-driving cars and trucks. Not only is the underlying technology of autonomous vehicles being questioned; so is the ethics of cruise management, focusing on founder and CEO Kyle Vogt.
In withdrawing the permit, the California Department of Motor Vehicles cited safety concerns but also alleged that Cruise, owned by General Motors, misled the agency about basic facts.
What Cruise didn't say, and what the DMV revealed Tuesday, is that after sitting for an unspecified period of time, the robotaxi began moving at about 7 mph, dragging the woman with it for 20 feet.
The combination of safety and trust issues will likely deepen public skepticism about the technology and cause regulators to reevaluate their level of trust in Cruise, if not the industry as a whole. This is according to Bryant Walker Smith, an expert in automated vehicle law at the University of South Carolina. If Cruise can't be trusted to be forthright about the facts surrounding a serious injury case, “naturally the next question is how can we trust anything else he's told us?”
This is what happened: a car with a human at the wheel hit a woman who was crossing the street against a red light at the intersection of 5th and market streets. The pedestrian slid over the hood and into the path of a Cruise robotaxi, without a human driver. She was trapped under the car and taken to a hospital.
Those were the facts that became public immediately after the incident. Cruise called the accident tragic, but said the robotaxi stopped as it should and that a human driver could not have reacted faster.
What Cruise didn't say, and what the DMV revealed Tuesday, is that after sitting for an unspecified period of time, the robotaxi began moving at about 7 mph, dragging the woman with it for 20 feet.
Cruise had shown a video of the incident to journalists, but prohibited them from publishing it publicly. (Because of that restriction, The Times rejected Cruise's offer.) The video shown to journalists ended with the robotaxi motionless. The video was edited and did not show the car starting and dragging the woman 20 more feet.
The DMV said Cruise showed it the same abbreviated video, and only later did the agency view the full version. The two sides are fighting over that version of events. Cruise said he showed the DMV the entire video from the beginning.
In any case, Smith said, “if Cruise didn't show [reporters] watching the full video or acknowledging that something else happened, that is not the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.”
He found Cruise withholding the entire clip “baffling” because, he said, “of course that's going to come out.”
When asked why the company didn't show reporters the part of the video in which pedestrians were being dragged, Cruise spokeswoman Hannah Lindow emailed this response: “We acted quickly to get the information out.” to the necessary parties, with our top priority being to ensure that all officials had access. to the information they needed immediately to arrest the criminal in this situation: the hit-and-run driver. Initial media reports indicated that the Cruise vehicle initially struck the pedestrian and made no mention of the hit-and-run driver who caused the incident. In addition, rescuers did not initially mention the driver who fled. “It was important to correct the record to show that the incident was initiated by a human-driven vehicle that fled the scene.”
Cruise and competitor Waymo have been criticized for months for the tendency of their robotaxis to interfere with firefighters, emergency medical workers and police, to the point that the chief of the San Francisco Fire Department deemed them “not ready for prime time.”
At the time, the companies requested permission from the California Public Utilities Commission for a major expansion of their robotaxi services in San Francisco. Opponents asked the commission for a pause and recommended that the emergency services problem be resolved first. In August, the commission voted 3-1 to greenlight the expansion. One of the votes in favor came from Commissioner John Reynolds, Cruise's former corporate counsel, appointed by Governor Gavin Newsom.
For Cruise, that plan has so far been thwarted. After the vote, a Cruise vehicle collided with a fire truck and the company's vehicles began acting in strange ways, grouping together to block pedestrian and vehicle traffic at busy intersections for no apparent reason. All of that preceded the human-drag-robot incident and Cruise's questionable response.
The repercussions could be enormous, Smith said. “One possibility is that this feeds into the narrative that automated vehicles and the companies behind them are suffering and failing,” he said.
The other possibility is that “this becomes a moment of differentiation” that separates the qualities of the different robotaxi companies before regulators and the general public.
Companies like Zoox, Motional and Waymo are taking a more deliberate and security-conscious approach to their deployments, he said. “Waymo, while not perfect, has been quite public and detailed about what safety means to them, much better than Cruise.”
Los Angeles is currently considering how to handle the expected influx of robotaxis in the near future. One problem: The state has not given cities authority to regulate the technology, a restriction that had been pushed by industry lobbyists and supported by Newsom.
Vogt often talks about safety as Cruise's top concern: “Cruise's culture and the sincerity with which we treat our values and behaviors is much greater than I've ever had in my career,” he told an audience at the Disrupt conference. in San Francisco in September.
But he also emphasized the need to act quickly. “San Francisco is a multibillion-dollar ride-sharing market,” he said. “The scale is going to be very fast. We will build thousands or maybe even more. [vehicles] next year…. The goal is to scale as quickly as possible in terms of total number of autonomous vehicles to make this business profitable and sustainable.”
For now, Cruise is not moving at all.
