Self-driving car startup Cruise runs into trouble after pedestrian collision: NPR

A year ago, the future looked bright for self-driving car startup Cruise. As 2022 winds down, CEO Kyle Vogt took to Twitter to post about the company's self-driving vehicles roaming the streets of San Francisco, Austin, and Phoenix.

“The people” is books“We are entering the golden years of AV expansion.”

Robotaxis, which provides rides for any paying customer without a driver behind the wheel, was one of the latest tech products to fully launch to the public this year. Dozens of companies, including Alphabet's Waymo and Amazon's Zoox, are vying for the title of king. Cruze, owned by General Motors, was one of those companies The fastest growing company among these startups.

General Motors has poured billions into Cruze as the company asserts expansion at an unprecedented pace.

“We're on the path that most companies dream of, which is exponential growth,” Vogt said during a July investor call. He boasted about the size of the driverless cruise fleet, adding: “You will see that size many times over in the next six months.”

By August, California had granted Cruise permission to operate about 300 robotaxis throughout San Francisco. (Waymo deploys about 100.) The company has begun testing in several other cities across the country, including Dallas, Miami, Nashville and Charlotte.

But then, in October, things took a disastrous turn.

On the night of October 2, one of Cruise's self-driving cars struck a pedestrian in San Francisco, leaving her seriously injured and fighting for her life. Her identity has not been released.

A series of events followed, ending with Vogt's resignation and GM announcing that it would withdraw hundreds of millions in financing. He now faces Cruz Government investigations, Fines may total millions And an uncertain future.

“They were the bull in a china shop,” says Missy Cummings, a professor at George Mason University who directs the Mason Center for Autonomy and Robotics. “They kept moving forward.” “When we sat down and discussed who was going to have the worst accident in that crowd, everyone knew it was going to be Cruz.”

The tension was rising

Even before the October incident, tensions over self-driving cars were mounting in San Francisco.

Both Cruise and Waymo say their self-driving cars are safer than human drivers – they don't get drunk, text or fall asleep at the wheel. The companies say they did Millions of miles have been driven without a driver without any human fatalities Roads are safer with responsible autonomous systems.

But as robo-taxis become more ubiquitous throughout San Francisco, residents have complained about their proximity Collisions and errors. Local reports showed footage of disoriented vehicles Residential cul-de-sac, Driving in wet cement On the construction site and regularly Red lights turn on.

There was an activist group called Safe Street Rebel Cataloging events, which now numbers more than 500. The group figured that if they put orange traffic cones on the hoods of self-driving cars, it would render the vehicles unable to move. So, they started going out at night to “cone” as many cars as possible as a form of protest.

“When you start doing passive aggressive protests like people putting orange cones on your cars, that's not going to come your way,” Cummings says.

Cruz and Waymo have also had problems with the police and fire departments in San Francisco. In government hearings, agencies testified that self-driving cars were a nuisance. they Nearly 75 incidents were recorded where self-driving cars interfered with rescue operationsincluding driving through yellow emergency tape, blocking fire station corridors, Running over fire hoses He refused to move for first responders.

“Our people can't pay attention to an autonomous vehicle when we have ladders to throw down,” San Francisco Fire Chief Janine Nicholson said at a hearing in August.

Despite public concern about self-driving vehicles, California regulators voted to allow the companies to expand robotaxi services in August. Which prompted the city of San Francisco to… Submit applications with the state Demanding a halt to expansion

Seven days after the vote, Cruz's car collided with a fire engine, injuring a passenger.

Pedestrian accident and alleged cover-up

After the fire truck collision, the California Department of Motor Vehicles asked Cruz to reduce its fleet in half, to 150 vehicles, while it investigated the accident.

Then, just weeks later, Cruz's car struck the pedestrian. Based on police reports and initial video footage from Cruz, the woman was He was first struck by a human hit-and-run driver Which her car threw into the path of the self-driving car.

Cruz said his car “braked hard to reduce the impact.” Some media outlets provided a video of the incident It ended immediately after the driverless car hit the woman. Cruz also submitted footage to the DMV.

Over the next few weeks, Cruise continued its expansion and launch Ride a driverless robotaxi in Houston. Then, in a surprise announcement at the end of October, the Department of Motor Vehicles ordered Cruise to cease all operations in California immediately.

The DMV says Cruz withheld footage from the night of the accident.

New video footage showed the Cruze hitting the pedestrian, running over it, then dragging it an additional 20 feet at 7 mph as it drove toward the curb and came to a stop on top of it.

Most human drivers wouldn't respond this way, says Philip Koopman, an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University and an expert on self-driving vehicle safety. “Before you move your car, you have to find out where the pedestrians are,” Koopman says. “The last thing you want to do is drive over them, but that's exactly what the Cruise vehicle did.”

Cruz says she gave organizers the entire video immediately after the incident. But the DMV says Cruz turned it in just 10 days later after requesting the footage.

It quickly snowballed in Cruz's favor after that. The company has recalled and grounded all of its cars nationwide – nearly 1,000. It began a third-party safety review of its robotic vehicle and hired an outside law firm to examine its response to the pedestrian accident. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, too An investigation was opened into the Cruz case.

Meanwhile, The Intercept reported this Cruise cars had difficulty spotting childrenAccording to internal documents. The New York Times reported that human remote workers had to do so Intervention to control autonomous cruise vehicles Every 2.5 to five miles.

By mid-November, Vogt was gone. almost Dozens of other executives stepped down Cruz announced that it would lay off nearly a quarter of its employees.

The effect ripples throughout the industry

Company spokeswoman Naveeda Forghani says Cruise will continue its work on self-driving cars as a commercial product. She added that the company's approach is “safety is our north star.” A GM spokesperson says it remains committed to Cruise “as it refocuses on trust, accountability and transparency.”

Waymo has avoided much of the public outrage that built up over the summer. Its spokesperson told NPR that “safety is our mission and top priority” and that “we take every incident seriously by investigating it to understand what happened.”

But the controversy surrounding Cruise is still affecting the self-driving industry overall, Carnegie Mellon's Koopman says.

“The entire industry, with one voice, was promoting the same talking points that Cruise was promoting,” Koopman says. “So, if one of them is discredited, it will discredit the entire industry because they are all using the same playbook.”

A lot of that, he says, is the claim that self-driving cars are superhuman when it comes to safety.

Both Cruise and Waymo have released studies stating that their cars are involved in fewer accidents than human drivers. One Waymo study says it has An 85% reduction in injury-causing collisions Cruz's study says so Has a 74% discount. Neither company issued preliminary data for these reports.

Koopman says the safety story could fall apart when people see self-driving cars on city streets making the same mistakes as human drivers. He says he would like to see companies focus on making sure the technology is actually secure.

“To be clear, human drivers will be texting, and they'll be distracted,” Koopman says. “There's an old saying, 'The lights are on, but no one's home.'” But it turns out that this also happens to robotaxis.