The Cruise Incident Result: A Case Study of a Side-Impact Collision Involving an Autonomous Vehicle
The incident has led to the resignation of a number of executives. The company recalled all its vehicles, paused its operations nationwide, and hired a new chief safety officer. GM has decided to pull back on some of the funding of Cruise, which has led to the laying off of 25% of the company’s employees.
Cruise executives are singled out in the report for failing to properly communicate with regulators. The report says the company leaders assumed regulators would ask questions that would lead to them providing more information about the pedestrian dragging. Cruise leadership is said to be fixated on demonstrating to the media that the car was driven by a human and not an autopilot vehicle, that hit the pedestrian. That “myopic focus,” the law firm concludes, led Cruise to “omit other important information” about the incident.
Another third-party report on the crash released by Cruise today, by the engineering consulting firm Exponent, found that technical issues contributed to the autonomous vehicle’s dangerous pullover maneuver. The self-driving car pulled over and dragged the woman underneath it after it classified the crash as a side-impact collision. Cruise says its technical issues were corrected when it recalled its software in November.
Prior to a meeting with San Francisco mayor’s office, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and other government officials on October 3, over 100 Cruise employees were aware of the pedestrian-dragging incident. The pedestrian being dragged was not talked about by Cruise. A bad internet connection prevented that from happening.
A law firm that is investigating the incident says Cruise tried to send a 90-second video but internet issues made it impossible.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the U.S Department of Justice are among the agencies looking into the company. Cruise said it is “fully cooperating” with the regulatory and enforcement agencies that have opened the investigations.