Cruise, the autonomous vehicle unit owned by General Motors, is suspending driverless operations nationwide days after regulators in California found that its driverless cars posed a danger to public safety.
The California Department of Motor Vehicles revoked the license for Cruise, which recently began transporting passengers throughout San Francisco, this week.
Cruise is also being investigated by U.S. regulators after receiving reports of potential risks to pedestrians and passengers.
“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,” Cruise wrote on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, on Thursday night.
Get DFW local news, weather forecasts and entertainment stories to your inbox. Sign up for NBC DFW newsletters.
The company announced last summer they were planning on beginning operations in Dallas with their driverless fleet of Chevy Bolts before the end of the year. The company’s goals aligned with Dallas's Vision Zero initiative to eliminate all traffic-related deaths and reach a 50% reduction in severe injuries from crashes by 2030.
In July 2023, Megan Prichard, vice president of ride-hailing and delivery, told NBC 5 the company had reported zero serious injuries after driving more than 3 million miles.
With tests ongoing in Dallas, the company said in mid-October they still planned to launch their service in Dallas amid a federal probe. Prior to the shutdown, the service was already in operation in Austin.
CRUISE ROBOTAXIS
The choice to suspend its driverless services isn't related to any new on-road incidents, Cruise added. Human-supervised operations of Cruise's autonomous vehicles, or AVs, will continue — including under California's indefinite suspension.
General Motors Co., which has ambitious goals for Cruise, has taken a significant blow this week. The Detroit automaker had been expecting annual revenue of $1 billion from Cruise by 2025 — a big jump from the $106 million in revenue last year when the company lost nearly $2 billion.
Cruise has also tested a robotaxi service in Los Angeles, as well as cities like Phoenix and Austin.
While the California Department of Motor Vehicles didn't elaborate on specific reasons for its suspension of Cruise's license this week, the Tuesday revocation followed a series of incidents that heightened concerns about the hazards and inconveniences caused by Cruise’s robotaxis.
Earlier this month a Cruise robotaxi ran over a pedestrian who had been hit by another vehicle driven by a human. The pedestrian became pinned under the tire of the Cruise vehicle after it came to a stop. In a statement, Cruise said it was continuing to cooperate with state and federal regulators investigating the Oct. 2 accident — and that its engineers are working on a way for its robotaxis to improve their response “to this kind of extremely rare event.”
Earlier this month, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration announced that it was investigating Cruise's autonomous vehicle division after receiving reports of incidents where vehicles may not have used proper caution around pedestrians in roadways, including crosswalks.
The NHTSA’s Office of Defects Investigation said it received two reports involving pedestrian injuries from Cruise vehicles. It also identified two additional incidents from videos posted to public websites, noting that the total number is unknown.
In December of last year, the NHSTA opened a separate probe into reports of Cruise's robotaxis that stopped too quickly or unexpectedly quit moving, potentially stranding passengers. Three rear-end collisions that reportedly took place after Cruise AVs braked hard kicked off the investigation.
According to an Oct. 20 letter that was made public Thursday, since beginning this probe the NHSTA has received five other reports of Cruise AVs unexpectedly breaking with no obstacles ahead. Each case involved AVs operating without human supervision and resulted in rear-end collisions.
“We welcome NHTSA’s questions related to our safety record and operations," Cruise spokesperson Hannah Lindow said in a statement sent to The Associated Press Friday. "We have cooperated with each of their requests to date as part of the ongoing investigation process and will continue doing so.”
Cruise has previously maintained that its record of driverless miles has outperformed comparable human drivers in terms of safety, notably crash rates.
