Cruise, the autonomous vehicle venture owned by General Motors, has issued a recall effecting 950 of its robotaxis following a pedestrian collision in San Francisco last month, NBC News reported.
Previously, the company had grounded all of its driverless operations following the Oct. 2 collision during which a pedestrian was thrown into the path of the Cruise robotaxi by a human driver in a different car who hit her first.
The Cruise autonomous vehicle braked aggressively before impact and then tried to pull over to the side of the road, according to the NHTSA filing and prior statements from the company. In the process, the vehicle dragged the pedestrian forward about 20 feet.
Cruise posted “Important Updates From Cruise” on its website. From the press release:
We believe that over time autonomous vehicles can significantly reduce the number and severity of car collisions, including the more than 40,000 deaths on U.S. roads each year. This is what motivates our work. We also know we have a responsibility to operate at the highest standards of safety, transparency and accountability.
We recently announced a pause of all our driverless operations while we take time to examine our processes and improve how we operate. During this time we plan to seek input from our government and agency partners and other key stakeholders to understand how we can be better partners.
Here are some of the initial steps Cruise has taken:
Issued a Voluntary Software Recall: As part of our larger efforts to assess, identify and remedy issues as we work with NHTSA and other regulators, we have issued a voluntary recall of part of our AV software based on a new analysis of our AV’s post-collision response on October 2. The recall addresses circumstances in which the Cruise collision detection subsystem may cause the Cruise AV to attempt to pull over out of traffic instead of remaining stationary when a pullover is not the desired post-collision response.
Issued a Recall through a 573 NHSTA Filing: We issued the recall through a 573 NHTSA filing, which is the standard protocol for a company looking to notify consumers of hardware or software safety issues that require a remedy. We have also developed a software update that remedies the issue described and have deployed it to our supervised test fleet, which remains in operation. We’ll deploy the remedy to our driverless fleet prior to those operations.
Announced a Chief Safety Officer (CSO) Role: Cruise is conducting a search to hire a Chief Safety Officer who will report directly to the CEO. In the meantime, Dr. Louise Zhang, VP of Safety & Systems, will assume the role of interim Chief Safety Officer and oversee our safety review & investigations.
Engadget reported that Cruise will soon lay off employees. The company’s CEO Kyle Vogt told staff of the decision in an all-hands meeting earlier this week. Cruise hasn’t yet decided who or how many people will lose their jobs.
It seems to me that Cruise is trying very hard to improve the actions taken by its driverless vehicles. Hopefully, their software update will prevent the cars from harming pedestrians. It is extremely unfortunate that Cruise is intending on laying off (at least some) of its workers, especially during the holiday season.
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