A law firm hired by General Motors’ self-driving subsidiary, Cruise, has found that the company failed to fully disclose details about a gruesome San Francisco crash to regulators, according to a blog post by Cruise. The incident, which occurred in October, led to California regulators suspending Cruise’s license to operate driverless vehicles in San Francisco. The law firm’s report states that Cruise did not inform the Department of Motor Vehicles that its autonomous car dragged a pedestrian who had been struck by a human-driven vehicle for about 20 feet. The report also states that Cruise did not verbally point out the vehicle’s pullover maneuver when showing a video of the crash to government officials due to internet connectivity issues. Cruise has accepted the law firm’s findings and recommendations.
The report also criticizes Cruise executives for failing to properly communicate with regulators and for being fixated on proving that it was a human-driven car, not the autonomous vehicle, that first struck the pedestrian. The law firm concludes that this focus led Cruise to omit other important information about the incident. The law firm attributes Cruise’s failings to poor leadership, mistakes in judgment, lack of coordination, an ‘us versus them’ mentality with regulators, and a misunderstanding of Cruise’s obligations of accountability and transparency.
Another report released by Cruise, conducted by engineering consulting firm Exponent, found that technical issues contributed to the dangerous pullover maneuver of the autonomous vehicle. The self-driving car’s software correctly detected and tracked the pedestrian and the human-driven car but classified the collision as a side-impact collision, leading it to pull over and drag the woman. Cruise claims that the technical issues were resolved when it recalled its software in November.
Following the crash, Cruise paused its self-driving operations across the US, with several executives leaving the company and layoffs affecting almost a quarter of its employees. General Motors has also announced a reduction in spending on Cruise by hundreds of millions of dollars compared to the previous year. The company now faces the task of restoring public trust and taking decisive steps to address the issues highlighted in the law firm’s report.
Images and subject matter derived from 3rd party sources including www.wired.com.
