"Cruise, the self-driving car unit of General Motors, is suspending all of its driverless operations across the U.S., after regulators in California said the vehicles aren't safe in public and pulled the company's self-driving permit.
"The most important thing for us right now is to take steps to rebuild public trust," Cruise said late Thursday in an online post. "Part of this involves taking a hard look inwards and at how we do work at Cruise."
The halting of Cruise's services represents another blow to GM's autonomous-driving efforts and follows a tumultuous week for the Detroit automaker, which also scaled back its electric-vehicle plans and confronted an expansion of the United Auto Workers strike to one of its largest and most profitable plants. On Friday, The Wall Street Journal reported that the automaker and UAW were close to completing a tentative agreement on a new contract.
Chief Executive Mary Barra has bet the company on future technologies, such as EVs and self-driving cars, as a way to reduce dependence on the traditional gas-engine models that now are the primary moneymakers but whose growth is limited, in large part by new auto-emissions regulations.
More recently, those initiatives have been facing challenges with buyers growing more hesitant about making the switch to an EV and as GM's losses continue to deepen on Cruise, which has faced scrutiny from both state and local regulators.
Cruise is majority-controlled by General Motors, which has invested deeply in the division and is looking to introduce a fully autonomous shuttle, called the Origin, that doesn't have a steering wheel or manual controls.
Earlier this past week, the California Department of Motor Vehicles said Cruise had misrepresented information related to the safety of its vehicles' technology and suspended the company's self-driving permit.
The decision followed an incident this month involving a woman who was severely injured after she was struck by a vehicle and then landed in the path of a driverless Cruise car, according to Cruise and the DMV, which regulates autonomous vehicles in the state. After coming to a stop, the Cruise car attempted to pull over while the woman was underneath the vehicle, according to the DMV. The car traveled about 20 feet and reached speeds of 7 miles an hour before coming to a final stop, the DMV said. Rescue workers lifted the car off the woman.
Cruise's autonomous vehicles are designed to perform such a maneuver after a collision to minimize safety risks, the company said. It is "doing an analysis to identify potential enhancements to the AV's response to this kind of extremely rare event."
The next day, Cruise showed the DMV a video of the accident captured by the autonomous vehicle's cameras, according to the DMV. The footage didn't show the car pulling over while the woman was pinned underneath, the DMV said. Cruise disputes the DMV's timeline.
The state agency says it only learned about the pedestrian's being dragged during a discussion with another government agency. Cruise provided the additional video upon request, which the DMV said it received on Oct. 13.
Outside California, Cruise has been operating driverless fleets in Phoenix, Houston and Austin, Texas, as it seeks to scale up the business in other U.S. cities. It also has driverless cars operating in Dallas and Miami, but those aren't being used commercially, a spokeswoman said.
Cruise said the decision to halt fleetwide operations isn't related to any new on-road incidents.
Cruise started offering a commercial driverless-car service in June 2022. The company had been trying to expand its self-driving operations to new cities before the permit suspension in California effectively halted operations in one of its biggest markets, San Francisco.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said it has opened a safety-defect probe into nearly 600 driverless cars operated by Cruise. NHTSA has said it is aware of four incidents, including two that resulted in injuries.
In December 2022, the federal auto-safety regulator opened a separate probe into about 240 Cruise driverless cars after receiving reports of vehicles braking hard with no obstacles in their path and with another driver approaching from behind.
In a letter published Thursday, NHTSA said it was seeking information about five additional crash reports as part of that investigation.
A Cruise spokeswoman said that the company welcomes NHTSA's questions related to its safety record and operations and that it would continue to cooperate with the agency's investigations." [1]
Women are no good for driver-less cars. A homeless drug abusing woman suddenly stepped with a bike during the night in the pathway of Uber driver-less car. Uber cancelled her own driver-less program after that. Now woman shows up flying over the road for driver-less car of GM. These are like angels, saving humanity from robots. Too bad they are hurt in the process.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Elaine_Herzberg
1. EXCHANGE --- GM's Cruise Pauses All Driverless-Car Operations. Feuer, Will; Felton, Ryan. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 28 Oct 2023: B.9.
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