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Self-driving car company Cruise said it is pausing operations on its driverless fleet while it reviews its safety procedures following a suspension by the state of California.
Cruise announced Thursday evening that it would suspend driverless operations in Texas and across the U.S. effective immediately after the California Department of Motor Vehicles announced the suspension on Tuesday. Cruise is a subsidiary of General Motors focused on self-driving vehicles, including monitored and fully autonomous variants.
“The most important thing for us right now is to take steps to restore public trust,” Cruise said in a post on X, formerly Twitter. “That includes taking a hard look inward at the way we work at Cruise, even if that means doing things that are uncomfortable or difficult.”
“With this in mind, we have decided to proactively pause driverless operations across all of our fleets while we take the time to review our processes, systems and tools and consider how we can operate in a way that maintains public trust win,” the company continued.
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Cruise announced that it is pausing operations of its self-driving cars due to a safety investigation. (Photo by Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images / Getty Images)
“This is unrelated to any new incidents on the road and monitored AV operations will continue,” Cruise noted. “We believe this is the right thing to do at a time when we need to be particularly vigilant about risks, focus relentlessly on safety and take action to restore public trust.”
| ticker | Security | Last | Change | Change % |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| GM | GENERAL MOTORS CO. | 27.22 | -1.34 | -4.69% |
Cruise was hit with an indefinite suspension by the California DMV last Tuesday, affecting both his testing and deployment permits for autonomous robot taxis. The suspension in the state came as part of an ongoing investigation into an incident involving one of the vehicles earlier this month.
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A driverless cruiser sits at an intersection after a collision on Thursday, August 17, 2023, in San Francisco, California. According to an eyewitness, the driverless car allegedly failed to yield to the fire truck’s emergency lights as it passed… (John Freeman/Fox News)
Both the state of California and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) have opened investigations into an incident in early October in which a human driver struck a pedestrian crossing the street, who then veered into the path of a Cruise robotaxis in an adjacent lane was and The vehicle could not stop in time to avoid the pedestrian and ended up coming to a stop on top of the pedestrian. The pedestrian was freed by first responders and taken to a nearby trauma center.
Prior to this incident, the California DMV said in August that it was investigating other “recent incidents of concern” involving Cruise vehicles in San Francisco, which led to a request that Cruise take half of its robotaxis off the road – a request that the company complied.
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NHTSA launched a separate safety investigation into the autonomous driving system in Cruise vehicles in December after two rear-end collisions. The agency said the vehicles could “brake inappropriately or become immobile.”