It’s a dark day for the nascent robotaxi industry. The California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) suspended Cruise’s license to operate fully-autonomous vehicles on all the state’s public roads, citing “an unreasonable risk to public safety.”
It follows an even darker day for a woman crossing Fifth Street between Market and Mission Streets in San Francisco’s Financial District on Monday October 2 at 9:29 p.m. She was hit by one car and knocked into the path of another. The driver of the first car fled the scene. The second car, which had no driver, was a white, all-electric Chevy Bolt named Panini that was being operated autonomously by Cruise, LLC, the autonomous vehicle division of GM, as a robotaxi, though at the time of the accident, it had no passengers.
What follows is taken from accounts by The San Francisco Standard, the San Francisco Chronicle, Cruise’s own report of the accident and the DMV order of suspension obtained by VICE Media. The vehicle came to a stop immediately upon impact with the victim but then sensed something was wrong and attempted to pull over. However, the victim was caught underneath the vehicle and was dragged 20 feet at a speed up to 7 mph before the vehicle again came to a stop with its right rear wheel resting on top of the victim’s leg. The victim was screaming in pain when reached by the city's fire department at 9:35 p.m. who freed her by using the jaws of life. The victim had “multiple traumatic injuries” according to San Francisco Fire Department’s Captain Justin Schorr. Her identity and condition remain unknown at the time of this writing.
The DMV response seems to retaliate against Cruise not just for the accident but also for hiding the portion of the video that showed that the Cruise vehicle was moving and dragging the victim underneath it. Cruise officials deny that they held back any part of the video and in their “detailed review” and put the onus of blame on the victim (she was crossing “against the light”) and the driver of the car (a “dark Nissan Sentra”) that first struck her.
According to orders of suspension sent to Cruise on Tuesday shown in the “Facts” of the Order of Suspension, the DMV met with Cruise representatives and the California Highway Patrol to discuss the accident before being shown video taken by the Cruise vehicle’s cameras
The DMV alleges that it was initially shown the video up until the time it first struck the woman.
"Footage of the subsequent movement of the AV to perform a pullover maneuver was not shown to the [DMV] and Cruise did not disclose that any additional movement of the vehicle had occurred after the initial stop," according to the DMV order.
DMV officials only learned of the Cruise vehicle moving to a stop “via discussion with another government agency."
Cruise denies it hid video from the DMV, saying the company showed the full video to the DMV multiple times during a meeting on October 3 and later provided a copy of the full video to the agency.
Cruise representatives noted that the human driver who initially struck the pedestrian is still at large. Cruise employees "are currently doing an analysis to identify potential enhancements to the AV’s response to this kind of extremely rare event."
The DMV cited a number of statutes in the California Code of Regulations as the basis for the suspension but seems to hold Cruise mainly accountable for the vehicle pulling over which "increased the risk of and may have caused further injury to the pedestrian."
But it must have been the omission of additional information and footage in Cruise’s initial meeting with DMV that "hinders the ability of the department to effectively and timely evaluate the safe operation of Cruise’s vehicles and puts the safety of the public at risk” that galled the DMV the most.
Cruise officials who arrived at the accident from Cruise’s control center first stated that their vehicle stopped immediately and turned on its flashers just as it was supposed to.
It was an easy explanation to believe, even for the San Francisco Fire Department, which has had several run-ins with and is a staunch foe of self-driving vehicles as they have interfered with fire and rescue scenes.
"The biggest concern is that someone is going to get really severely injured or killed because we cannot properly respond to an incident," Fire Chief Jeanine Nicholson said to ABC News in June in “SFFD Chief is Fed Up with Robotaxis Interfering with Firefighters on the Job. “Or if they can get in the way at an incident. We've really gotten lucky so far, but it's only a matter of time before something really, really catastrophic happens."
Anti-tech activists had been able to stop Cruise vehicles by simply putting traffic safety cones on the hoods of the vehicles, which led to viral videos of Cruise vehicles helplessly immobile, their flashers on. We remain skeptical that a Cruise vehicle had sensors underneath its rear axle which were able to detect something being dragged underneath, as was stated by the San Francisco Fire Department, which added that “representatives from Cruise responded to firefighters” and “immediately disabled the car remotely.”
GM’s CEO, Mary T. Barra, had praised autonomous vehicles for having been involved in far fewer collisions than human drivers. In a call with financial analysts before the DMV decision, she said “We do believe that Cruise has tremendous opportunity to grow and expand” and “Safety will be our gating factor as we do that.”
Barra is due to say more about Cruise during GM's Q4 earnings 3 months from now and at the investor presentation in the first half of 2024. Cruise has cost GM $791 million before taxes between July and September 2023.
The Future of Robotaxis
Cruise officials responded to the DMV suspension by saying, in effect: Fine. We’ll go back to having a person behind the steering wheel.
The cavalier response belies a huge setback for the hopes of creating a city full of vehicles that exist only to deliver people from one point to another, replacing taxi and Uber drivers. Waymo, Alphabet’s division in the same race, Cruise and others have bet billions of dollars on this prospect.
Waymo has been allowed to continue its operations in San Francisco. Waymo cars were involved with fewer incidents and has not had a single incident involving “bodily injury.”
Just as Cruise was first coming under increased scrutiny in September, Waymo offered a report card of its near flawless autonomous driving record: over 3.8 million miles by insurance giant Swiss Re against a most-flawed record of humans showing 600,000 claims over 125 billion human driven miles, a ratio of 3.26 damage claims per million miles for humans, 0.78 damage claims per million miles for Waymo.