Cruise pauses driverless vehicle operations across US amid safety probe

Self-driving car company Cruise announced that it’s pausing the operations of its driverless fleet while it reviews its safety procedures in the wake of a suspension by the state of California.

Cruise announced Thursday night that effective immediately it was suspending driverless operations in Texas and throughout the U.S. following the California Dept. of Motor Vehicles’ suspension that was announced Tuesday. Cruise is a subsidiary of General Motors focused on self-driving vehicles, including supervised and fully autonomous variants.

“The most important thing for us right now is to take steps to rebuild public trust,” Cruise said in a post on X, formerly Twitter. “Part of this involves taking a hard look inwards at how we do work at Cruise, even if it means doing things that are uncomfortable or difficult.”

“In that spirit, we have decided to proactively pause driverless operations across all of our fleets while we take time to examine our processes, systems, and tools and reflect on how we can operate in a way that will earn public trust,” the company continued. 

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“This isn’t related to any new on-road incidents, and supervised AV operations will continue,” Cruise noted. “We think it’s the right thing to do during a period when we need to be extra vigilant when it comes to risk, relentlessly focused on safety, & taking steps to rebuild public trust.”

Cruise was hit with an indefinite suspension announced last Tuesday by the California DMV covering both its testing and deployment permits for autonomous robotaxis. The suspension in the state came amid an ongoing investigation into an incident involving one of the vehicles earlier this month.

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Both the state of California and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) launched investigations into an early October incident in which a human driver hit a pedestrian crossing the street, who was then launched into the path of a Cruise robotaxi in an adjacent lane and the vehicle wasn’t able to stop in time to avoid the pedestrian and ultimately came to a stop on top of the pedestrian. The pedestrian was freed by first responders and taken to a nearby trauma center.

Prior to that incident, the California DMV said in August that it was investigating other “recent concerning incidents” involving Cruise vehicles in San Francisco which prompted a request that Cruise take half its robotaxis off the road – a request the company complied with.

NHTSA launched a separate safety probe of the autonomous driving system in Cruise’s vehicles in December following a pair of rear-end crashes. The agency said the vehicles “may engage in inappropriately hard braking or become immobilized.”