Following California withdrawing Cruise's permit to operate autonomous vehicles in the state, the company announced that it will suspend all robotaxi operations in the United States.
The move comes after the California Department of Motor Vehicles alleged that Cruise withheld from regulators video footage of Cruise's robotaxi dragging a person down a city street.
The future of the company is uncertain. Its parent company, General Motors, has lost $1.9 billion on Cruise so far this year, including a $732 million loss in the third quarter, according to its latest earnings report. Competitor Ford shuttered its Argo robotaxi unit in 2022, concluding that the potential for distant profits was not worth the huge cash loss.
The California DMV gave two reasons for suspending Cruise's license this week: concerns about safety and claims that the company withheld from regulators video footage showing a Cruise robotaxi dragging an already injured woman 20 feet down the road. street pavement before emergency workers could reach her.
“The most important thing for us right now is to take steps to rebuild public trust.” Cruise said in an online statement Thursday night. “Part of this means taking a hard look inward and looking at how we work at Cruise.”
Cruise vehicles with humans at the wheel will continue to operate. Until this week, the company had been operating driverless services in San Francisco, Phoenix, Miami, Houston and Austin, Texas.
Cruise must be “highly vigilant when it comes to risks, relentlessly focusing on safety” as he rebuilds public trust, a spokeswoman told The Times.
The incident marks a dark chapter in the emerging history of the automated vehicle industry. It remains to be seen whether Cruise's actions will damage the industry's reputation, or just his own.
Robotaxi companies claim that autonomous vehicles are already safer than human-driven cars. San Francisco officials say they are having trouble getting these companies to provide adequate data to prove it. But in this case Cruise faces more than just safety: These are accusations that he misled regulators and the media in ways that could erode public trust.
On October 2, a car with a human behind the wheel hit a woman crossing at the intersection of 5th and Market streets in San Francisco on a red light. 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 was later taken to a hospital.
Cruise quickly called the accident tragic, but said the robotaxi stopped as it was supposed to and that a human driver could not have reacted as quickly.
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 sitting motionless, but did not include the vehicle dragging the woman.
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 told reporters that he showed the DMV the entire video from the beginning.
In response to a request for comment, a DMV spokesperson said it supports the facts described in the suspension orders.
Kyle Vogt, CEO of Cruises
(Kimberly White/Getty Images for TechCrunch)
Controversy has surrounded the company for months, after San Francisco's fire chief attacked Cruise and another robotaxi company, Waymo, for interfering with fire trucks and emergency workers. Police said robotaxis were also getting in their way.
Dozens of such incidents have been reported, including robotaxis blocking an ambulance exit from a fire station, driving over fire hoses and parking there, crashing through police tape and becoming tangled in downed utility lines. Cruise robotaxis sometimes gather up to a dozen at a time to block pedestrians and other cars at busy intersections, a phenomenon whose cause remains a mystery, at least to the public.
However, the California Public Utilities Commission, which regulates taxi fares, voted to allow a massive expansion of robotaxi service throughout San Francisco. Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt soon began talking big plans for explosive growth, including next year's introduction of a six-passenger, steering-wheelless capsule vehicle called Origin. “The goal is to scale as quickly as possible in terms of the total number of autonomous vehicles to make this business profitable and sustainable,” he said at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in September.
Waymo, owned by Google parent Alphabet, also plans to increase its fleets and move into new cities. It has already launched in Santa Monica and will soon expand to Los Angeles. Los Angeles officials are trying to take a closer look at the company's plans, but are hampered by a state law that gives cities little authority over robotaxi operations.
Other robotaxi companies are also preparing to expand, including Zoox and Motional. Those companies are likely to attract more scrutiny following the Cruise setback, said Bryant Walker Smith, an expert in automated vehicle law at the University of South Carolina.
Alain Kornhauser, who directs the autonomous vehicle engineering program at Princeton, said the crawling incident is truly tragic, but it's something that can be fixed. “The problem is, I don't think anyone writing code has thought about a person trapped under the car,” he said. “Now they can do something like mount a camera to make sure no one is under the car before it moves.”
People will forgive the robotaxi's strange behavior if they trust the companies involved, he said. “But this business of covering up and not being truthful” hurts public acceptance in the long run, she said. “Didn't we learn from Watergate that the cover-up can be worse than the crime? They could apologize. They might say, 'We're not going to do that again.'”
