Cruise Publishes Crash Report

Following Cruise’s involvement in a crash caused by a human driver in early October 2023, Cruise temporarily suspended all robotaxi services a few weeks later, replaced the management team and also dismissed employees. Cruise has now published a 195-page report prepared by Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, an external law firm hired by Cruise. This report was also sent to the relevant CA DMV, NHTSA and CPUC authorities.

Background: On October 2, a human-driven Nissan struck a woman crossing the street at a red light, throwing her underneath the passenger- and driverless Cruise Robotaxi traveling parallel to it. The taxi stopped immediately, but dragged the woman a few meters as it tried to pull over to the side of the road. The Nissan driver, on the other hand, hit and ran.

The authorities had accused Cruise of only showing the authorities the video footage of the accident itself, but not the subsequent action of dragging the victim along. As a result, Cruise’s license was revoked in California and Cruise suspended his robotaxi service nationwide.

The report is based on interviews with 88 Cruise employees and the review of 200,000 internal company documents to reconstruct the exact course of events and understand whether evidence such as certain parts of the videos of Cruise’s vehicle were withheld from the authorities.

According to the report, the most important findings were as follows:

• By the morning of October 3, Cruise leadership knew about and discussed that the Cruise AV had moved forward after the initial pedestrian impact and, in doing so, had dragged the pedestrian for approximately 20 feet. More than 100 Cruise employees – including certain members of Cruise’s senior leadership, legal, government affairs, and systems integrity teams who briefed government officials – were informed of this information prior to Cruise’s meetings on October 3 with the San Francisco Mayor’s Office, NHTSA, DMV, and other government officials. In each of those meetings, Cruise had the intent to affirmatively disclose those material facts by playing the Full Video and letting the “video speak for itself.” Because Cruise adopted that approach, it did not verbally point out these facts. This is because Cruise assumed that by playing the Full Video of the Accident for its regulators and other government officials, they would ask questions and Cruise would provide further information about the pullover maneuver and pedestrian dragging.
• The weight of the evidence establishes that Cruise played or attempted to play the Full Video depicting the pedestrian dragging in their October 3 briefings with the regulators and other government officials. However, in three of these meetings, internet connectivity issues likely precluded or hampered them from seeing the Full Video clearly and fully. And Cruise failed to augment the Full Video by affirmatively pointing out the pullover maneuver and dragging of the pedestrian.
• On October 2 and 3, Cruise leadership was fixated on correcting the inaccurate media narrative that the Cruise AV, not the Nissan, had caused the Accident. This myopic focus led Cruise to convey the information about the Nissan hit-and-run driver having caused the Accident to the media, regulators, and other government officials, but to omit other important information about the Accident. Even after obtaining the Full Video, Cruise did not correct the public narrative but continued instead to share incomplete facts and video about the Accident with the media and the public. This conduct has caused both regulators and the media to accuse Cruise of misleading them.
• The reasons for Cruise’s failings in this instance are numerous: poor leadership, mistakes in judgment, lack of coordination, an “us versus them” mentality with regulators, and a fundamental misapprehension of Cruise’s obligations of accountability and transparency to the government and the public. Cruise must take decisive steps to address these issues in order to restore trust and credibility. 
• Despite the failure to discuss the pullover maneuver or pedestrian dragging with regulators, the evidence reviewed to date does not establish that Cruise leadership or employees sought to intentionally mislead or hide from regulators the details of the October 2 Accident. Instead, they attempted to show the Full Video of the Accident in good faith, but with varying degrees of success due to technical issues. 
• Finally, the DMV Suspension Order is a direct result of a proverbial self-inflicted wound by certain senior Cruise leadership and employees who appear not to have fully appreciated how a regulated business should interact with its regulators. Regulators and other government officials who enforce laws and regulations designed to protect human health and safety want and need to know all relevant facts about an accident involving a regulated product. It was a fundamentally flawed approach for Cruise or any other business to take the position that a video of an accident causing serious injury provides all necessary information to regulators and otherwise relieves them of the need to affirmatively and fully inform these regulators of all relevant facts. As one Cruise employee stated in a text message to another employee about this matter, our “leaders have failed us.”

Cruise’s internal investigations coincide with the investigations by the law firm.

1. leading up to the initial collision between the human-driven vehicle and pedestrian, the AV accurately detected, classified, and tracked both the pedestrian and the human-driven vehicle.
2. the subsequent collision of the AV with the pedestrian was caused by the individual being launched into the AV’s path of travel by the human-driven vehicle.
3. the AV incorrectly classified the collision with the pedestrian as a side-impact collision, which led the AV to perform a subsequent pullover maneuver (to the outermost lane) instead of an emergency stop. In addition, while not a leading cause of the pullover movement, a semantic mapping error that failed to recognize that the AV was already in the outermost lane was a contributing factor.

So far, Cruise has taken (or had to take) the following measures:

• We voluntarily paused all of Cruise’s nationwide driverless, supervised, and manual AV driving operations in order to take time to examine our processes, systems, and tools and improve how we operate.
• Given Cruise’s deficient response to the October 2 incident, nine individuals departed Cruise in December, including key leaders from Legal, Government Affairs, Commercial Operations, and Safety and Systems. In addition, Cruise’s CEO, Chief Product Officer, and VP of Communications have departed since the October 2 incident. 
• Cruise has established a new Chief Safety Officer role and appointed an interim leader while the search is underway for a permanent hire.
• Experienced leaders from GM have stepped in to support Cruise’s Legal, Government Affairs, and Communications teams as well as to establish more robust and transparent processes for working with our regulators and engaging with the public. 

Cruise has also made changes to the software in order to react correctly in such cases in the future.

This article was also published in German.