Following are edited excerpts from
a current report in The New York Times:
Cruise Says Hostility to Regulators Led to Grounding of Its Autonomous CarsA law firm’s review found that executives had failed to fully explain an October crash, which the Justice Department is also investigating.Cruise, the driverless car subsidiary of General Motors, said in a report on Thursday that an adversarial approach taken by its top executives toward regulators had led to a cascade of events that ended with a nationwide suspension of Cruise’s fleet and investigations by California and federal authorities, including the Justice Department.
The roughly 100-page report was compiled by a law firm that Cruise and G.M. hired to look into whether Cruise’s executives had misled California regulators about an October crash in San Francisco in which one of its vehicles dragged a woman 20 feet. The review found that while the executives had not intentionally misled state officials, they had failed to explain key details about the incident.
Cruise also said the Justice Department
and the Securities and Exchange Commission, as well as state agencies and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, were investigating how it had handled the incident.
The report is central to Cruise’s efforts to regain the public’s trust and eventually restart its business. Cruise has been largely shut down since October, when the California Department of Motor Vehicles suspended its license to operate because its vehicles were unsafe and the company misrepresented the incident. It responded by pulling its driverless cars off the road across the country, laying off a quarter of its staff and replacing Kyle Vogt, its co-founder and chief executive, who resigned in November, with new leaders.
Cruise hopes that the investigation will help repair its reputation and clear a path for it to restart its self-driving business. It believes that its problem was the outgrowth of a leadership team that made quickly building out a business a priority over the safety of its operations.
In Cruise’s absence, Waymo, which was started by Google, has become the only self-driving car operation offering taxi rides in San Francisco. Though Waymo’s fleet of roughly 2
50 cars has had few major incidents, the City of San Francisco sued the State of California last month for allowing Waymo and Cruise vehicles to operate without tighter regulations.
The report described Cruise as a disorganized company embroiled in disagreement and confusion over what had happened and how to handle it. Though engineers and dozens of people inside the company knew that its car had dragged the woman, key senior executives, including the chief legal officer, said they hadn’t known before meeting with the D.M.V.
G.M., which bought Cruise in 2016 for $1 billion, has stepped in to steer the company. It installed its general counsel, Craig Glidden, as president of Cruise and made him responsible for overseeing the investigation and helping to evaluate how the business should proceed. Mr. Glidden is trying to change the culture of the company to put more emphasis on safety and transparency with regulators and the public.
Even before the Oct. 2 accident, Cruise’s cars were generating headlines for other issues, including a collision with a fire truck and an incident in which one of its cars drove into wet concrete and got stuck.
Note: Text emphasis in this report was added.
