Cruise self-driving cars suspended in California over safety issues : NPR

Table Of Content

• California orders Cruise driverless cars off the roads because of safety concerns
• Pedestrian injuries
• Rider Review
• The Origin is the GM subsidiary’s first attempt to build an fully autonomous car from the ground up
• Delivery, made driverless
• TechCrunch Mobility: Cruise robotaxis return and Ford’s BlueCruise comes under scrutiny

Cruise's path to autonomous driving creates opportunities for increased mobility and independence. The system worked seamlessly and I could see using it on occasion. The question is whether drivers want to cede that kind of control.

California orders Cruise driverless cars off the roads because of safety concerns

It tried to sugarcoat the disappointing news by announcing a plan to dramatically increase the number of its test vehicles on the road in San Francisco. We believe that self-driving technology will save lives and make roads safer. Since becoming part of General Motors in March 2016,[17] Cruise has been working on developing software and hardware to make fully autonomous vehicles using modified Chevrolet Bolts. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) said the driver of a Ford Mustang Mach-E who crashed into a stationary car in Texas in February was using the hands-free driver-assistance system known as BlueCruise. This is the first known fatality resulting from a crash involving the use of BlueCruise.

Pedestrian injuries

During our operational pause over the last few months, Cruise maintained ongoing and extensive testing in complex, dynamic simulated environments and on closed courses, enabling continuous retraining and improvement. Now, we are building on that work to create high-quality semantic maps and gather road information to ensure future operations meet elevated safety and performance targets. An activist group called Safe Street Rebel has been cataloging the incidents, which now clock in at more than 500. The group figured out that if they put orange traffic cones on the hoods of driverless cars, they would render the vehicles immobile. So, they started going out at night to "cone" as many cars as possible as a form of protest. On the night of October 2, one of Cruise's driverless cars struck a pedestrian in San Francisco leaving her critically injured and fighting for her life.

Rider Review

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This will help inform where we ultimately will resume driverless operations. Despite public angst over autonomous vehicles, California state regulators voted to allow the companies to expand their robotaxi services in August. That prompted the city of San Francisco to file motions with the state demanding a halt to the expansion.

Its spokesperson told NPR that "safety is our mission and top priority" and that "we treat every event seriously by investigating it to understand what happened." After the fire truck collision, the California Department of Motor Vehicles told Cruise to reduce its fleet in half, to 150 cars, while it investigated the incident. But, as robotaxis became increasingly ubiquitous throughout San Francisco, residents complained about near collisions and blunders. Local reports showed footage of confused vehicles clogging a residential cul-de-sac, driving into wet cement at a construction site and regularly running red lights. We are now assembling and selling Electric Moke vehicles for Moke America. It’s a 20th-century collectible car reinvented with 21st-century green-friendly electric power, available exclusively in the USA.

But it’s also attempting to be more pragmatic and attuned to the realities of growing and scaling a real business. The not-a-car sits on the gleaming black stage surrounded by a halo of light. It’s orange and black and white, and roughly the same size as a crossover SUV, but somehow looks much larger from the outside. There is no obvious front to the vehicle, no hood, no driver or passenger side windows, no side-view mirrors. By Andrew J. Hawkins, transportation editor with 10+ years of experience who covers EVs, public transportation, and aviation. His work has appeared in The New York Daily News and City & State.

Delivery, made driverless

Those incidents include driving through yellow emergency tape, blocking firehouse driveways, running over fire hoses and refusing to move for first responders. The DMV originally gave Cruise a permit for 300 driverless vehicles in San Francisco, but it cut that number in half after one of its cars collided with a firetruck in August. Ford has said it will build an autonomous car without a steering wheel or pedals by 2021, while Waymo has begun offering a limited number of rides in fully driverless minivans to its customers in Phoenix, Arizona.

Armed with traffic cones, protesters are immobilizing driverless cars

He says he'd like to see the companies focus on making sure the technology is actually safe. In 2017, Cruise was conducting testing on public roads with Cruise AVs in San Francisco, Scottsdale, Arizona, and the metropolitan Detroit area. Both Cruise and Waymo say their driverless cars are safer than human drivers – they don't get drunk, text or fall asleep at the wheel. The companies say they've driven millions of driverless miles without any human fatalities and the roads are safer with their autonomous systems in charge.

TechCrunch Mobility: Cruise robotaxis return and Ford’s BlueCruise comes under scrutiny

Faraday Future is now grappling with two internal whistleblowers. Both former employees have filed lawsuits claiming the troubled EV company has been lying about some of the few sales it has announced to date. They also claim founder Jia Yueting has “weaponized” the EV startup’s HR department to retaliate against anyone who speaks up about these alleged misrepresentations. Driverless cars run by Cruise, which is owned by GM, and Waymo, which is owned by Alphabet, have been involved in numerous mishaps in the city over the past several months. They've run red lights, rear-ended a bus and blocked crosswalks and bike paths.

It was another wild week in the world of transportation, particularly in the EV startup and automated driving industries. Both Cruise and Waymo have released studies saying their vehicles are involved in fewer crashes than human drivers. One Waymo study says it has an 85% reduction in injury-causing collisions and a Cruise study says it has a 74% reduction. A lot of that is the claim of driverless cars being superhuman when it comes to safety, he says. Safety is the defining principle for everything we do and will guide our progress through this process. Cruise’s AV stack is based on AI technology that learns from information gathered through our driving experience and retrains and evolves our models continuously.

It’s a city that supports AV and transportation innovation, and Phoenix leaders strive to ensure the metro area is an incubator for advanced technology. We plan to expand this effort to other select cities as we continue to engage with officials and community leaders. Cruise ridehail services are not available at this time, but you can join the waitlist to be one of the first. Carcruises.com was started in 2000 by Vito Capaccio and has become the premier destination on the Internet for car cruises, meets, shows, and other events in the USA. What I really wanted to try was the advanced driver-assistance system, and specifically the automatic lane change feature, which I had yet to test.

I have so many more questions — about the sensor suite, the business model, the testing (if any) that Cruise has conducted — but I’m informed that our time is done. The event is being managed by a unionized workforce, and any additional time could cost Cruise an additional $12,000. I thank Vogt for his time and jokingly ask if there’s an “abort” button in the vehicle.

He boasted about the size of Cruise's driverless car fleet, adding that "you will see several times this scale within the next six months." Despite those incidents, state regulators voted in August to allow self-driving car companies to expand their operations in San Francisco and other California cities. That prompted the city of San Francisco to file motions with the state demanding a halt to that expansion. Inside are two bench seats facing each other, a pair of screens on either end... The absence of all the stuff you expect to see when climbing into a vehicle is jarring. No steering wheel, no pedals, no gear shift, no cockpit to speak of, no obvious way for a human to take control should anything go wrong.

Cruise will continue its work on driverless cars as a commercial product, says spokesperson Navideh Forghani. She added that the company's approach is "with safety as our north star." GM's spokesperson says it remains committed to Cruise "as they refocus on trust, accountability and transparency." Meanwhile, The Intercept reported that Cruise cars had difficulty detecting children, according to internal documents. And The New York Times reported that remote human workers had to intervene to control Cruise's driverless vehicles every 2.5 to five miles. Based on police reports and initial video footage from Cruise, the woman was first struck by a hit-and-run human driver whose vehicle threw her into the path of the driverless car. Federal regulators are also looking at the safety of driverless cars.

Elon Musk’s decision to green-light a robotaxi over an affordable EV might cost the company its lead, TC reporter Tim De Chant writes. Cruise says it gave regulators the entire video immediately after the incident. But the DMV says it was only after requesting the footage that Cruise handed it over – 10 days later. Seven days after the vote, a Cruise car collided with a fire truck, injuring a passenger. A cascade of events followed that ended with Vogt resigning and GM announcing it was pulling hundreds of millions in funding. Cruise is now facing government investigations, fines that could total millions and an uncertain future.

We’ve made significant progress, guided by new company leadership, recommendations from third-party experts, and a focus on a close partnership with the communities in which our vehicles operate. Cruise cars tell their wheels and other controls how to move along the selected path and react to changes in it. The result is a ride that’s safe, efficient, and natural-looking to other drivers. I’m back in a Mercedes EV, this time a 2024 Mercedes EQE 350 4MATIC. The model retails at $77,900, not including the destination fee. The version I drove came in at $97,615, due to all sorts of options, like a 10-degree rear axle steering system, head-up display, air suspension, AMG exterior and a $1,250 driver-assistance system.