The California Department of Motor Vehicles has yanked Cruise’s permits to operate its autonomous vehicles across the Golden State, citing the agency’s determination that its vehicles are “not safe for the public’s operation” and that the cars pose “an unreasonable risk to the public,” among other reasons.
In a brief statement, the DMV added that it had informed the General Motors subsidiary what steps it needed “to apply to reinstate its suspended permits,” but did not explain what those precisely entail.
While its autonomous operations are suspended, the DMV is allowing the company to operate with the presence of a human safety driver.
This suspension comes one week after the National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration said it was investigating the company following two incident reports of injuring pedestrians.
Navideh Forghani, a Cruise spokesperson, said in an emailed statement that the DMV is reviewing an October 2 incident in San Francisco involving a hit-and-run accident, where a woman was hit by a human driven-car and then thrown into the path of an oncoming Cruise autonomous vehicle, or AV.
Forbes previously reported that the victim was “dragged” by the AV for 20 feet.
“Shortly after the incident, our team proactively shared information with the California DMV, CPUC, and NHTSA, including the full video,” Forghani continued.
“We have stayed in close contact with regulators to answer their questions and assisted the police with identifying the vehicle of the hit and run driver. Our teams are currently doing an analysis to identify potential enhancements to the AV’s response to this kind of extremely rare event.”
Cruise has been under pressure from local authorities to do a better job of interacting with first responders and pedestrians. This month, the company said it would modify its response times to detect emergency vehicles earlier.
Since the California Public Utilities Commission’s August decision to allow Cruise and its primary rival, Waymo, to offer paid services 24 hours a day in San Francisco, Cruise cars in particular have been involved in a number of incidents.
These include: seemingly not yielding to a fire truck en route to an emergency, getting stuck in wet concrete, causing a traffic jam at a local music festival and, according to the San Francisco Fire Department, even briefly preventing an ambulance from leaving the scene of a different crash where the victim ultimately died after being brought to a hospital. (The SFFD said in a statement that the agency did not “[attribute] this pedestrian death to Cruise AVs.”)
San Francisco Supervisor Aaron Peskin, who has been a critic of the company’s practices in his city, told Forbes by text message that the suspension was “better late than never.”
“San Francisco has long held that Cruise vehicles were not ready for prime time and the state should have never allowed their unlimited deployment in the first place,” he added.
The DMV’s announcement came during a previously-scheduled meeting of the San Francisco County Transportation Authority, where local fire officials among others testified before the local agency.
Phil Koopman, a professor of computer science who has studied AVs extensively and has often pointed out that while Cruise underscores how much safer their vehicles are than humans, there simply aren’t enough tested miles to know whether that is true. He likened Cruise awarding itself a gold medal during a marathon after simply only one mile, and warned the local agency.
“You should make policy decisions not knowing how the safety is going to turn out,” he said.
For now, Cruise only operates in San Francisco, Austin, and Phoenix, but is currently testing in at least 10 other U.S. cities, including San Diego and Nashville. Analysts have previously said that AV industry as a whole is expected to generate hundreds of billions of dollars of revenue before the end of the decade.
“San Francisco for us is just the beginning,” Davide Bacchet, Cruise’s distinguished engineer in robotics, said in a November 2021 marketing video. “And we are prepared to expand to other cities and other countries. The size of our fleet is going to grow exponentially.”
This story is developing. Please check back for updates.
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