(Adds Cruise blog post)
By David Shepardson
WASHINGTON, April 7 (Portal) – General Motors’ robotaxi unit Cruise LLC is recalling automated driving software in 300 vehicles after one of its driverless vehicles crashed into the back of a bus in San Francisco.
The March 23 collision was due to a software bug in a Cruise automated vehicle (AV) that inaccurately predicted the movement of an articulated San Francisco Municipal Transit Authority bus, Cruise said Friday. The crash caused moderate damage to the Cruise but resulted in no injuries.
Cruise said in a filing with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) on Friday that the software was updated on March 25 to address concerns that the system “could inaccurately predict the movement of articulated vehicles such as buses and semi-trucks.”
“Fender flares like this rarely happen to our AVs, but this incident was unique,” Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt said in a blog post. “We do not expect our vehicles to hit the rear of a city bus under any circumstances, so even a single incident was worthy of immediate and careful investigation.”
Cruise said in a separate file with California the vehicle was traveling on Haight Street when a bus pulled up in front of it and the Cruise struck the rear bumper.
Vogt said: “The behavior of the bus was reasonable and predictable. He drove off a bus stop into a lane and then came to a stop Bus at about 10 km/h.”
The driverless vehicle’s view of the front of the bus was completely blocked as the bus pulled out in front of the AV.
“Because the AV had previously seen the front part and recognized that the bus could bend, it predicted that the bus would move as connected parts, with the rear part following the predicted path of the front part,” Vogt said adding that this was the only crash of this type that the company has experienced.
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Cruise said after the update it determined the crash would not happen again.
Cruise announced in September that it had recalled and updated the software in 80 self-driving vehicles following a June accident in San Francisco that injured two people.
NHTSA said last year the software could “mispredict” the path of an oncoming vehicle.
The NHTSA launched a formal safety investigation into Cruise’s autonomous driving system in December after receiving reports of incidents in which Cruise’s self-driving vehicles “could brake unreasonably hard or become unable to move.”
(Reporting by David Shepardson; Editing by David Goodman, Chizu Nomiyama and Mark Porter)