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Cruise says in documents posted by the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration that it already has updated software in test vehicles that are being supervised by human safety drivers. The driverless fleet will get the new software before resuming operations, the company says. Technological issues aside, what really put Cruise in hot water late last year was its response to the incident.
Exclusive look at Cruise’s first driverless car without a steering wheel or pedals
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GM was responsible for the base vehicle design and the electric powertrain, while Honda helped create the interior’s “efficient use of space,” Vogt says. Meanwhile, Cruise handled the sensing and computing technologies, as well as the experience from the rider’s standpoint. Its official name is “Origin,” and Kyle Vogt, the co-founder and chief technology officer of Cruise, is clearly excited to be showing it off.
Incidents
We believe driverless technology has the potential to save lives, enhance access and improve communities. Tesla recently settled a lawsuit over a 2018 crash that killed an Apple engineer. In that case, Tesla maintained that the driver had failed to stay alert and take over driving before the crash. The settlement may have provided a blueprint for others suing over Autopilot. A police spokesperson said a person from the Hyundai was also on the roadway and was hit.
Driverless car startup Cruise's no good, terrible year
A cascade of events followed that ended with Vogt resigning and GM announcing it was pulling hundreds of millions in funding. Cruise is now facing government investigations, fines that could total millions and an uncertain future. Now Cruise appears to be going back to basics, a sharp pivot away from the aggressive growth strategy the company has been pursuing for the last few years.
Both victims, males aged 21 and 20, were pronounced dead at the scene. The Pennsylvania state police said on Thursday that a Mach E was in the left lane when it struck a stationary Hyundai Elantra that earlier had collided with a Toyota Prius. The driver of a Ford electric SUV involved in a February fatal crash in Texas was using the company’s partially automated driving system before the wreck, federal investigators said on Thursday.
New paths ahead
Problems at Cruise could slow the deployment of fully autonomous vehicles that carry passengers without human drivers on board. It also could bring stronger federal regulation of the vehicles, which are carrying passengers in more cities nationwide. Cruise will resume manual driving of its autonomous vehicles to create maps and gather road information in certain cities, starting with Phoenix, the company said Tuesday. The GM subsidiary already had a presence in Phoenix before it pulled its entire U.S.-based fleet last year following an incident in San Francisco that left a pedestrian stuck under and dragged by a Cruise robotaxi. GM and the Cruise board have been scrambling ever since the October 2 incident put the company in the crosshairs of state, local and federal agencies.
Dense, urban testing meets low-speed retirement community testing
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Even as Cruise expanded to new cities in the second half of 2023, its robotaxis were routinely malfunctioning in cities like San Francisco and Austin, disrupting the flow of traffic, public transit and first responders. Voyage is a spinoff from Udacity, an online learning service that offers courses in driverless technology. Cameron headed the startup’s open-source self-driving project before launching his own venture. Sebastian Thrun, Udacity’s chairman and one of the founders of Google’s self-driving car project, was briefly chairman of Voyage before a conflict forced him to step down. The company operates a fleet of self-driving cars in two retirement communities, one near San Jose, California, and the other north of Orlando, Florida, both called The Villages.
Cruise AV
Videos of Cruise robotaxis blocking traffic and driving into a construction site were shared on social media. But it was a crash with an emergency response vehicle that began to chip away at the company’s seemingly impenetrable exterior. This is the first time that Cruise has demonstrated its Level 4 capabilities.
A new way to ride
But, as robotaxis became increasingly ubiquitous throughout San Francisco, residents complained about near collisions and blunders. Local reports showed footage of confused vehicles clogging a residential cul-de-sac, driving into wet cement at a construction site and regularly running red lights. By August, California had given Cruise permission to run around 300 robotaxis throughout San Francisco. And the company had started testing in several more cities across the country, including Dallas, Miami, Nashville and Charlotte. "We're on a trajectory that most businesses dream of, which is exponential growth," Vogt said during a July call with investors. He boasted about the size of Cruise's driverless car fleet, adding that "you will see several times this scale within the next six months."
The company recalled and grounded all of its cars nationwide – nearly 1,000 vehicles. It initiated a third-party safety review of its robotaxis and hired an outside law firm to examine its response to the pedestrian incident. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration also opened an investigation into Cruise. Based on police reports and initial video footage from Cruise, the woman was first struck by a hit-and-run human driver whose vehicle threw her into the path of the driverless car.
The complaints involved vehicles operating autonomously and “encroaching on pedestrians present in or entering roadways, including pedestrian crosswalks in the proximity of the intended travel path of the vehicles”, the agency said. A lot of that is the claim of driverless cars being superhuman when it comes to safety, he says. Meanwhile, The Intercept reported that Cruise cars had difficulty detecting children, according to internal documents. And The New York Times reported that remote human workers had to intervene to control Cruise's driverless vehicles every 2.5 to five miles. The October incident wasn’t the first time Cruise’s technology has caused problems.
The 2 October crash prompted Cruise to suspend driverless operations nationwide after California regulators found that its cars posed a danger to public safety. The state’s department of motor vehicles revoked the license for Cruise, which was transporting passengers without human drivers throughout San Francisco. Koopman says the safety narrative can unravel when people see the driverless cars on city streets making the same mistakes as human drivers. He says he'd like to see the companies focus on making sure the technology is actually safe. Cruise mainly operates its autonomous vehicles in dense, urban settings like downtown San Francisco, while Voyage oversees a fleet of low-speed autonomous vehicles providing trips to residents of several retirement communities.
A bill pending in the California Senate would give cities and counties authority over robotaxi services — a power that currently resides with state government agencies. Waymo’s expansion to Los Angeles will bring autonomous for-profit taxis to the nation’s second-largest city — and to a city long synonymous with car travel. Waymo already operates commercial robotaxi services in San Francisco and Phoenix. In the crash, another vehicle with a person behind the wheel struck a pedestrian, sending the person into the path of a Cruise autonomous vehicle. But it then pulled to the right to get out of traffic, pulling the person about 20ft (six meters) forward.
But the DMV says it was only after requesting the footage that Cruise handed it over – 10 days later. Anyone laid off will also receive their 2023 bonus (eligible target payout) on January 5, 2024. Cruise has been working on the design of the Origin for over three years, but Honda’s involvement “super charged” the effort. The two automakers didn’t collaborate on every tiny detail; instead, they split up the work based on their expertise.
Cruise cars tell their wheels and other controls how to move along the selected path and react to changes in it. The result is a ride that’s safe, efficient, and natural-looking to other drivers. Ford’s Blue Cruise system allows drivers to take their hands off the steering wheel while it handles steering, braking and acceleration on highways.
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