a law office Investigators hired by General Motors’ self-driving subsidiary Cruise to look into the company’s response to last year’s tragic crash in San Francisco found that the company had not fully disclosed disturbing details to regulators. This is what the tech company announced in an announcement today. blog post. Following the October incident, California regulators suspended Cruise’s driverless license in San Francisco.
According to a new report from the law firm Quinn Emanuel, Cruz told the California Department of Transportation that after a human-driven vehicle struck a pedestrian, a self-driving car pulled out of traffic and struck the pedestrian. He said he did not tell them that it had dragged him about 20 feet. Cruz said he accepted the company’s views and recommendations.
Investigators found that Cruise did not “verbally point out” the vehicle’s pullover maneuver when it played video of the crash from one of its self-driving cars to government officials. The report concluded that internet connectivity issues when the company attempted to share video of the incident “prevented or likely prevented” regulators from viewing the video in its entirety. .
The report names Cruise executives for failing to properly communicate with regulators. Company executives assumed regulators would ask the company to provide more information about pedestrian dragging, the report said. And Cruise’s leadership has been described as “obsessed” with proving to the media that it was a human-driven car, not a self-driving car, that struck the pedestrian in the first place. With that “myopic focus,” Cruz “omitted other important information” about the case, the law firm concluded.
“There are many reasons for Cruise’s failure in this case, including a lack of leadership, poor judgment, lack of coordination, an ‘us versus them’ mentality with regulators, and fundamental questions about Cruise’s responsibility and liability,” the law firm said. “A misunderstanding,” he concluded. Transparency to the government and the public. ” The company said it needed to take “decisive steps” to restore public trust.
A separate third-party report into the crash, released by Cruise today by engineering consulting firm Exponent, found that a technical issue played a role in the self-driving car’s dangerous pullover maneuver. Although the self-driving car’s software correctly detected, recognized, and tracked the pedestrian and human-driven vehicle, it classified this collision as a side collision, causing the self-driving car to stop on the shoulder and place the woman under the car. I ended up dragging it. Cruise said the technical issue was fixed during a software recall in November.
Cruise has temporarily suspended its self-driving operations in the United States since late October. Nine executives and CEO and co-founder Kyle Vogt left the company in the aftermath of the accident. The company laid off almost a quarter of its workforce at the end of 2023. General Motors announced it will cut spending on tech companies by hundreds of millions of dollars this year compared to last year.
