As covered by GM Authority in October 2023, the National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration (NHTSA) announced that it had opened an investigation into Cruise – General Motors’ self-driving subsidiary – over concerns regarding inadequate pedestrian safety. Now, the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) has suspended Cruise’s driverless operations.
Citing the violation of four statutes, the California DMV has announced that it has placed an immediate suspension of Cruise’s deployment and driverless testing permits in San Francisco.
“Public safety remains the California DMV’s top priority, and the department’s autonomous vehicle regulations provide a framework to facilitate the safe testing and deployment of this technology on California public roads,” a statement from the California DMV read. “When there is an unreasonable risk to public safety, the DMV can immediately suspend or revoke permits. There is no set time for a suspension.”
(1/6) We learned today at 10:30 am PT of the California DMV’s suspension of our driverless permits. As a result, we will be pausing operations of our driverless AVs in San Francisco. https://t.co/A5HAV2WUv7
— cruise (@Cruise) October 24, 2023
“The California DMV today notified Cruise that the department is suspending Cruise’s autonomous vehicle deployment and driverless testing permits, effective immediately,” the statement continued. “The DMV has provided Cruise with the steps needed to apply to reinstate its suspended permits, which the DMV will not approve until the company has fulfilled the requirements to the department’s satisfaction. This decision does not impact the company’s permit for testing with a safety driver.”
Cruise LLC responded with the following statement on social media: “We learned today at 10:30 am PT of the California DMV’s suspension of our driverless permits. As a result, we will be pausing operations of our driverless AVs in San Francisco.” The company added that when one of its robotaxis ran over a pedestrian that was previously stuck by a human-driven vehicle, the robotaxi attempted to pull over to avoid additional safety issues and consequently dragged the pedestrian further forward before coming to a stop.
It’s worth noting that Cruise announced a series of technology upgrades following complaints over its robotaxi units’ response to emergency vehicles. After these updates, Cruise AV units will be able to better identify and avoid emergency vehicles and equipment.
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Comments
Good. Let’s hope this os the beginning of the end for these.
Move Cruise HQ to Texas.
They’ll lose a lot of engineers if that happens. You’d be surprised at the amount of people who would flat-out refuse moving to Texas. It’s the reason why Tesla moved its engineering HQ back to California.
We have a lot of people (yes, mainly retirees) moving here from Cali, but none that I’ve run into from TX. TX is a world unto its own but Cali is developing a rep for folks “out there” to live. Neither is the solution. The SE is becoming a tech center so maybe moving to the right coast is the best solution.
The alphabet, druggie crowd should stay in Calipornia with like-minded equals. Especially San Franners .
We don’t want it.
What I find hilarious is how the response from cruise is generally, “We are constantly evaluating the software and deploying updates”. So I’ve been in software for decades, this is basically alpha, maybe beta software. For watching cat videos alpha/beta is fine. Who cares. For life critical software, they usually test and wait for production for deployment in situ.
I could be wrong but it just seems more and more likely that in a year or so many OEM’s will be licensing Full Self Driving from Tesla.
Tesla’s “self driving” has killed more people than GM’s Cruise or Supercruise technology.
@Jeremy
Keep betting against Tesla I guess and then find out.
Quick question, is Tesla signing on to use other charging Networks or is every other Car Brand begging Tesla to be allowed to use their Network? Just wondering.
Same thing will happen with Full Self Driving Software. You will see.
No they won’t. It does not work. NHTSA is finally doing a real investigation. This could actually end up being the opposite of what you think. If full self driving is dinged and tesla is forced to give back all those 10 grand deposits for something that will never work, expect a tesla bk. And your comment about superchargers is also misinformed. Why do you think they did it. Perhaps maybe the fact opening their network was required to get more milk from the government? 7.5 billion reasons. And conversely, if other manufacturers wanted the milk, they had to be compatible. Follow the money, lonnie always does. Always. And I sense lonnie is in financial difficulties. His almost tearful earnings call plus his letter to up the CAFE standards tells me for some reason he is on the desperate side. We won’t know until either he implodes or manages to “fix” it. We did not find out about his near bk for what 4 or 5 years until he said tesla almost collapsed.
According to gm, Cruise lost over $700m in the third quarter alone and now this. One has to wonder how much automakers think they can charge for this technology vs the costs they are incurring to develop it.
gm is suspending retooling Orion Assembly to save $1.5 billion next year, yet they pour money down the Cruise black hole that will probably never yield the results promised.
Smartest thing to come from California (government) I have heard in a long time.