According to internal materials reviewed by The Intercept, Cruise cars were also in danger of driving into holes in the road.
In Phoenix, Austin, Houston, Dallas, Miami, and San Francisco, hundreds of so-called autonomous vehicles, or AVs, operated by General Motors’ self-driving car division, Cruise, have for years ferried passengers to their destinations on busy city roads. Cruise’s app-hailed robot rides create a detailed picture of their surroundings through a combination of sophisticated sensors, and navigate through roadways and around obstacles with machine learning software intended to detect and avoid hazards.
AV companies hope these driverless vehicles will replace not just Uber, but also human driving as we know it. The underlying technology, however, is still half-baked and error-prone, giving rise to widespread criticisms that companies like Cruise are essentially running beta tests on public streets.
Despite the popular skepticism, Cruise insists its robots are profoundly safer than what they’re aiming to replace: cars driven by people. In an interview last month, Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt downplayed safety concerns: “Anything that we do differently than humans is being sensationalized.”
The concerns over Cruise cars came to a head this month. On October 17, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration announced it was investigating Cruise’s nearly 600-vehicle fleet because of risks posed to other cars and pedestrians. A week later, in San Francisco, where driverless Cruise cars have shuttled passengers since 2021, the California Department of Motor Vehicles announced it was suspending the company’s driverless operations. Following a string of highly public malfunctions and accidents, the immediate cause of the order, the DMV said, was that Cruise withheld footage from a recent incident in which one of its vehicles hit a pedestrian, dragging her 20 feet down the road.
In an internal address on Slack to his employees about the suspension, Vogt stuck to his message: “Safety is at the core of everything we do here at Cruise.” Days later, the company said it would voluntarily pause fully driverless rides in Phoenix and Austin, meaning its fleet will be operating only with human supervision: a flesh-and-blood backup to the artificial intelligence.
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Sam Biddle is a technology reporter focusing on issues of surveillance, privacy, and corporate power. He was previously a senior writer at Gawker, and his work has also appeared in GQ, Vice, and the New York Times magazine, among other outlets.
