Breaking: Cruise Pauses Driverless Operations
On Thursday, October 26th at 6:00 PM PDT, Cruise announced it is pausing all driverless operations across all their fleets.
On the company’s LinkedIn page they posted: “The most important thing for us right now is to take steps to rebuild public trust. Part of this involves taking a hard look inwards and at how we do work at Cruise, even if it means doing things that are uncomfortable or difficult.”
Entering into a phase of retrospective safety assessment, Cruise is hoping they will be able to find a way to earn the public’s trust: “… we have decided to proactively pause driverless operations across all of our fleets while we take time to examine our processes, systems, and tools and reflect on how we can better operate in a way that will earn public trust.”
Two days earlier, on Tuesday, October 24th 2023, at 10:30 AM PDT, the California DMV suspended Cruise’s autonomous vehicle deployment and driverless testing permits using language that likely foreshadows further legal troubles, saying the suspension was based on:
"the performance of the vehicles,” and
"The manufacturer” had “misrepresented” information on their safety
The performance of the vehicles likely has to do with the subsequent pullover maneuver from the October 2nd incident, in which another vehicle hit a pedestrian, who was then flung into the path of the Cruise AV, and how the Cruise AV continued to maneuver while the woman was trapped underneath the vehicle. Emergency responders arrived on the scene and freed the woman from under the left rear wheel of the Cruise AV within minutes.
Surprisingly, on the same day as the DMV’s suspension, ABC7’s reporter, Lyanne Melendez, released an interview with Cruise’s Executive Vice President of Engineering, Mohamed “Mo” Elshenawy, in which she asks directly about the Cruise AV capability to react as well as a human in the event of a collision due to somebody landing directly in the path of the AV.
She asked, "Do you think that your vehicles at this point can… detect something that is beyond anybody's control, … [somebody is] for instance hit by a car, and lands in front of your vehicles, could a human have done it differently, or do you think you're better at that?"
Mo carefully responds that if their AVs were in the same situation as the original human driver that initially hit the pedestrian, the AV would not have hit the pedestrian in the first place. But he does not answer the question about whether or not their AVs can handle the effects of a person landing in front of their vehicles better than a human can.
While the “performance” of the Cruise AV may be debatable, it is in my opinion that the claim Cruise “misrepresented” their safety is the most serious one. Apparently, in initially disclosing the incident to DMV, Cruise did not show the full video of the subsequent pullover maneuver.
The intentionally false or even uninformed claims about a product’s safety by the manufacturer increases the exposure to gross negligence charges, potentially even criminal charges, and that by not clearly showing what the Cruise AV’s emergency behaviors were in response to a person trapped under the vehicle, they violated the law.
Having been found to be unsafe in California, the subsequent fallout across all other states in the United States would predictably be to pause or suspend Cruise’s driverless operations. If those other states would not, then when the next accident occurs in those states, the state would be at risk for not following the same public safety protocol as California.
This may be what Cruise is “proactively” guarding against, since, in my opinion, this is more reactive to a growing number of incidents of questionable safety.
Retrospect has reported on previous instances in which Cruise misrepresented the safety of their vehicle’s performance on public roads:
Their January 6th, 2022 marketing video driving through a dust cloud claiming it was not “fazed” but false cyclist detections briefly appeared in the video
The June 22nd, 2022 crash in which Cruise claimed the AV stopped due to a prediction that a 40 mph Prius was going to execute a right turn, which it was not
In our June 22nd report, our Executive Summary said it succinctly, “Cruise LLC is putting the public at too much risk, and they still need Safety Drivers in their cars… Based on the implausibility of Cruise’s statements, this report concludes that Cruise’s management of public safety poses an unreasonable risk without Safety Drivers.”
Regardless of whether Cruise’s statements are “implausible” or “misrepresented,” it is, in my opinion, however, unlikely that the State of California will be pursuing criminal charges given that the California DMV has already given terms that will allow Cruise to be approved to drive autonomously once again.
Please stay tuned as we will continue to release posts in the coming days about the proper evidences cities and states should have on hand before allowing AV companies to operate without Safety Drivers on their public roads.
In a March, 2023 IEEE article, I said, “The most convincing evidence is, if you demonstrate through fault-injection strategies, that we exercised the safety mechanism and it works, and that we can always monitor the safety mechanism is working, and if it ever isn’t working, we’re going to stop - That’s the type of evidence that should be made publicly available and it’s unique to each developer and each platform.”
I posted on August 19th, 2023, after a Cruise AV pulled out in front of an active fire truck and got hit, “Better PR is not going to fix anything. Actions will. Cruise should be voluntarily putting their safety drivers back in per their safety process, not waiting for the CA Vehicle DMV Services to tell them what to do.”
In November of 2022, I posted a short video about the proper and necessary evidences that shall be demonstrated to the public and said:
"I don't want to see the autonomous vehicle safety industry turning into, you know, a bunch of spectators or back seat drivers or Monday morning quarterbacks, who, any time an incident occurs simply say, 'Oh, you did a bad job. I could have done it better.' That's not really beneficial to anybody"
"Our goal is not to jump down anyone's throats, particularly AV developers, but we're also not going to present to the public, as independent autonomous vehicle safety analysts, some narrative that says, 'Hey, everything is fine here. Everything looks ok,' when, in fact, it's not and we don't know what we're talking about. We want to honestly and truthfully show evidence of safety."
"Our main mission, really, is to help developers get early feedback on when there are potential risks that their vehicle is not able to account for."
Right now, Cruise is still relying on a PR strategy, taking a victim-like stance, seemingly overly-cautious, when, in fact, they should have been relying on their engineers and safety teams that they previously ignored (July 14th, 2022 Anonymous Cruise Employee writes letter pleading to CPUC to not permit driverless operations). The engineers can and will get it done, and they will develop excellent products and services that make the public safe. All Code of Ethics of Engineers shall hold the public’s safety paramount.
The number one, biggest issue, in all this “safety” talk in the AV industry is the “Target Fixation” fallacy. We’ll talk more about that in the coming days, but when safety is not properly defined, and you’re only focused on the thing you don’t want to do, you get tunnel vision and invariably hit the very thing you’re trying to avoid. We need to take our eyes off the scary stuff and look ahead to the good stuff. “Safety” is not defined by accidents, but something much better.
It is my sincere advice and encouragement to Kyle Vogt to take the reigns firmly, not worry what the investors say, and keep yourself out of jail, your employees out of jail, and the public safe. Elizabeth Holmes’ tragedy is very real, and anyone who knows, knows. Today you’re on the right path and you’ve made the right decision.
Take this opportunity to get Cruise in the lead, especially with California, and work collaboratively on an open framework or model of some minimum acceptable evidences of automatically ensuring safety. Here’s a great opportunity: Why is the California DMV not being fully transparent about their requirements for re-approval? There is no reason why Cruise can’t be transparent, and in many ways, improve upon those requirements the California DMV has set. Setting the bar high and failing is better than failing to set the bar high.