GMs Cruise CEO resigns amid concerns over driverless car safety Automotive industry

Table Of Content

• GM-owned Cruise "failed to disclose" full video and key crash details, DMV said.
• Poet Victoria Chang touches on feminism, grief and art at L.A. Times Festival of Books
• No prison time for developer who bribed city officials for 18 years
• Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt resigns from GM-owned robotaxi unit
• Electric scooter rider critically injured in hit-and-run, San Francisco police say
• Vogt resigns as CEO of Cruise following safety questions, recalls of self-driving vehicles
• Armed with traffic cones, protesters are immobilizing driverless cars
• After robotaxi dragged pedestrian 20 feet, Cruise founder and CEO resigns

The collision on October 2 involved a female pedestrian being hit by a human driver and landed in the path of a Cruise robotaxi, which ended up running her over and dragging her 20 feet. Both autonomous and manual vehicle operations at Cruise continue to be suspended, affecting a fleet of 950 robotaxis. In October, the California Department of Motor Vehicles suspended the company’s operating permit, citing concerns about risks to public safety.

GM-owned Cruise "failed to disclose" full video and key crash details, DMV said.

By Andrew J. Hawkins, transportation editor with 10+ years of experience who covers EVs, public transportation, and aviation. The announcement comes after Cruise said in late October that it is pausing operations of its driverless fleet throughout the U.S. following a suspension by the state of California. Vogt's resignation comes roughly two years after he was reappointed as CEO, following an unexpected departure by Dan Ammann, a former GM executive, in December 2021. In orders of suspension the California DMV issued to Cruise, the regulators accused the company of failing to give a transparent account of what happened during the pedestrian collision. "To my former colleagues at Cruise and GM—you’ve got this!" he went on to write.

Poet Victoria Chang touches on feminism, grief and art at L.A. Times Festival of Books

The company recently announced one of GM’s lawyers would expand his role within Cruise. Then Motherboard reported Cruise’s first email to California’s DMV after the accident didn’t mention the whole dragging part. According to TechCrunch, Cruise engineering exec Mo Elshenawy will take over as president and CTO. The last 10 years have been amazing, and I’m grateful to everyone who helped Cruise along the way.

No prison time for developer who bribed city officials for 18 years

The startup I launched in my garage has given over 250,000 driverless rides across several cities, with each ride inspiring people with a small taste of the future. Cruise was hit with an indefinite suspension by the California DMV covering both its testing and deployment permits for autonomous robotaxis. The suspension in the state came during an ongoing investigation into an incident involving one of the vehicles in October. GM executives, including CEO and Chair Mary Barra, had hoped the startup would be ramping up a driverless transportation network this year, and hoped Cruise would play a notable role in doubling the company's revenue by 2030.

A few other of Cruise’s incidents, including hitting the back of a bus, running into downed power lines, turning from the wrong lane and being hit by a fire truck are also on that list for me, but others may disagree. After stopping, the Cruise vehicle reportedly realized it had hit a pedestrian. However, it incorrectly concluded it had hit her on the side of the car, rather than having run her over with the front wheels. It followed programming to clear the road and so attempted to pull over by driving forward 20 feet and slightly to the right. In doing so, it pulled the victim along and ended up with the rear tires resting on her leg.

The problem is that almost every incident will have a fairly obvious fix when examined after-the-fact. In fact, it’s one of the great things about robotaxis that unlike humans, none of the cars in the fleet (or competitor’s fleets) will make the same mistake again. The real failure, though, was the creation of a culture of keeping details close to the vest. Cruise had a disturbing pattern of revealing only what they felt they had to. This probably arose from fear of the public’s instinct to look at incidents rather than statistics, but in the end it was not sustainable.

A video, which TechCrunch viewed a day after the incident, showed the robotaxi braking aggressively and coming to a stop over the woman. The DMV’s order of suspension stated that Cruise withheld about seven seconds of video footage, which showed the robotaxi then attempting to pull over and subsequently dragging the woman 20 feet. Three weeks later, California regulators suspended Cruise’s permit to operate its driverless service in San Francisco.

Armed with traffic cones, protesters are immobilizing driverless cars

San Francisco-based Cruise is seen as one of the most advanced autonomous driving companies in the world, and it had started charging passengers for journeys in some US cities. However, it paused all of its driverless cars on 26 October after California regulators revoked its licence to transport passengers without a driver after an accident on 2 October. There has been frequent speculation that they were pushing too hard, too fast. Even so, they received a permit to expand service and quickly did so, but then rapidly had a series of safety incidents, culminating in the pedestrian dragging. He argued that self-driving cars would lead to a dramatic drop in traffic fatalities, using the example of a young girl killed in a San Francisco intersection to bolster his argument. Cruise even bought a full-page ad in The New York Times declaring “human drivers are terrible” and holding up its driverless cars as the only solution.

After robotaxi dragged pedestrian 20 feet, Cruise founder and CEO resigns

Cruise co-founder and CEO Kyle Vogt has resigned from his role at the autonomous vehicle venture owned by General Motors, according to a company statement sent to CNBC on Sunday. The DMV action came three weeks after a Cruise vehicle hit and dragged a pedestrian in San Francisco. A woman entered a crosswalk at nighttime and was hit by two cars, the second of which was the Cruise vehicle. First, a Nissan Sentra "tragically struck and propelled the pedestrian into the path of the AV," Cruise said in a description of the incident. Cruise, General Motors’ robotaxi subsidiary, has announced the resignation of its founder/CEO, Kyle Vogt.

This caps a stunning month for Cruise and Vogt, who founded the company as a startup then sold it to GM. For a period, GM had appointed Dan Ammamn as CEO of Cruise, but he left in a conflict with Mary Barra, CEO of GM, over Cruise’s plans and IPO potential, and Vogt returned to the role (while continuing as CTO). Under Vogt’s returned leadership, Cruise underwent a rapid expansion, deploying live service to the public in multiple cities and announcing several more that would go live soon.

General Motors’ self-driving-car unit, Cruise, is shaking up its leadership after the company lost permits needed to operate in California and paused its operations. On Saturday, one day before resigning, Vogt reportedly apologized to staff in an email. If there is an objective list of such things, and a company is failing at too many of them, it may be a sign they are not ready.

Vogt sent out an email Saturday saying that certain employees could sell a limited number of shares in a one-time opportunity. Vogt didn’t provide many details but said the company was developing a plan to conduct a new tender offer to provide restricted stock unit liquidity to mitigate potential tax implications. Dan Kan, who co-founded Cruise with Vogt and held a far less public-facing role, has also resigned, TechCrunch has confirmed with sources familiar with the matter. Vogt said in his resignation announcement that "the status quo on our roads sucks, but together we’ve proven there is something far better around the corner" and that he is planning to now spend time with his family and "explore some new ideas." "The most important thing for us right now is to take steps to rebuild public trust," Cruise said in a post on X at the time. "Part of this involves taking a hard look inwards at how we do work at Cruise, even if it means doing things that are uncomfortable or difficult."

But a series of run-ins between autonomous cars and emergency vehicles made California regulators think twice about giving robotaxis free rein of San Francisco, where Waymo and Cruise first began testing their driverless fleets a couple years ago. Vogt's decision to step down, announced late Sunday, follows a recent recall of all 950 Cruise vehicles to update software after one of them dragged a pedestrian to the side of a San Francisco street in early October. The California Department of Motor Vehicles revoked the license for Cruise. The California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) last month suspended Cruise's permits for autonomous vehicle deployment and driverless testing. Cruise subsequently announced a "pause" of all of its driverless operations in the US, which includes San Francisco, Austin, Phoenix, Houston, Dallas, and Miami.

I don’t have access to the internal details of all these incidents as would be needed to make a full judgement, but it could be it would say Cruise pushed too hard. With that guarantee, the companies must face the public’s difficulty in comparing human unsafety with machine unsafety. We’re picky and don’t want to be run over by robots, but accept being run over by drunks.

Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt Resigns From Robotaxi Company - The San Francisco Standard

Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt Resigns From Robotaxi Company.

Posted: Sun, 19 Nov 2023 08:00:00 GMT [source]

I regularly advised their PR department that in my judgment they were taking the wrong approach. Vogt wanted Cruise to dominate the market much in the same way that Uber dominated Lyft. But in truth, Uber’s failed effort to launch driverless cars turned out to be way more instructive. He resigned Sunday night, less than a month after the struggling robotaxi company lost its license to operate in California and halted operations of its fleet. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration also launched a separate safety probe of the autonomous driving system in Cruise’s vehicles in December following a pair of rear-end crashes.

"As CEO, I take responsibility for the situation Cruise is in today," he wrote in an email to staff first reported by Reuters. "There are no excuses, and there is no sugarcoating what has happened. We need to double down on safety, transparency, and community engagement." "As for what's next for me, I plan to spend time with my family and explore some new ideas. Thanks for the great ride!" Vogt wrote. In spite of its mistakes, Cruise has also been the subject of unfair treatment. The San Francisco Fire Department accused them of blocking an ambulance, delaying the journey of a patient to hospital, where they died.