Third-party reports give favorable evidence: Cruise, the leader in autonomous driving, is expected to make a comeback?

On Thursday local time, General Motors' self-driving car subsidiary Cruise disclosed that the company is under investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and released progress after the accident on October 2 last year and related third-party reports.

The background of the incident is that in early December last year, a traffic accident occurred in San Francisco. A woman was hit by a car into the lane of a self-driving Cruise car and was seriously injured. The driver of the first car hit and run, and the injured woman was subsequently run over by the self-driving car.

The controversial point of the accident is that the Cruise driverless vehicle detected the impact and braked urgently, but then started the "pull over" procedure and dragged the person under the vehicle for another distance (nearly 6 meters).

An investigation commissioned by Cruise showed that there was no evidence that Cruise employees or executives misled or lied to regulators about the 2023 traffic accident, but they also did not proactively provide details of the accident.

The investigation was conducted by engineering consultancy Exponent, which noted that during a meeting between Cruise and regulators after the Oct. 2 crash, Cruise executives tried to show the full video of the impact taken from the vehicle, but "technical issues" prevented regulators from seeing it. Cruise then failed to report to regulators the details of what actually happened (the victim was dragged by a car).

Later, the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) discovered the fact that the Cruise driverless vehicle hit a pedestrian and crushed and dragged it several meters. The department believed that the Cruise driverless vehicle was not safe enough to operate on the road, and accused Cruise of concealing important information about the accident, which led to California regulators revoking its operating license. Cruise subsequently suspended all its driverless operations in the United States.

In the aftermath of the accident, Cruise employees were unaware of the fact that the victim was towed by a car, and they were initially focused on correcting media reports that suggested Cruise's self-driving vehicles were the sole perpetrators.

Then, even after Cruise learned that the pedestrian was towed, the company did not promptly release the news to the outside world and did not show the complete video to the media. Exponent blamed its communication failure on "short-sightedness" and failed to eliminate Cruise's fault from the initial impact.

The Exponent investigation concluded that Cruise failed in this matter for a number of reasons: poor leadership, errors in judgment, a lack of coordination, an "us versus them" mentality with regulators, and a fundamental misunderstanding of Cruise's obligations to government and the public to be accountable and transparent.

Until the accident, Cruise had been a leader in the self-driving industry. The company plans to deploy its so-called "robotaxis" to a dozen or more cities by 2024. General Motors CEO Mary Barra said she remains focused on a future of self-driving cars, but the incident was a major setback.

"We acknowledge that we have not met the reasonable expectations of regulators and the communities we serve, and we have not met our own expectations," Cruise said on Thursday. "We are fully cooperating with regulators' investigations and have made significant process improvements and operational and technical changes."