Cruise Says Hostility Toward Regulators Led To Grounding of Its Autonomous Cars (nytimes.com) 35
Cruise, the driverless car subsidiary of General Motors, said in a report on Thursday that an adversarial approach taken (non-paywalled link) by its top executives toward regulators had led to a cascade of events that ended with a nationwide suspension of Cruise's fleet. From a report: The roughly 100-page report was compiled by a law firm that Cruise hired to investigate whether its executives had misled California regulators about an October crash in San Francisco in which a Cruise vehicle dragged a woman 20 feet. The investigation found that while the executives had not intentionally misled state officials, they had failed to explain key details about the incident. In meetings with regulators, the executives let a video of the crash "speak for itself" rather than fully explain how one of its vehicles severely injured the pedestrian. The executives later fixated on protecting Cruise's reputation rather than giving a full account of the accident to the public and media, according to the report, which was written by the Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan law firm.
The company said that the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission were investigating the incident, as well as state agencies and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. 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. 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.
The company said that the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission were investigating the incident, as well as state agencies and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. 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. 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.
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It is a lot simpler - a cocksure idiot with a bad attitude will eventually get enough bad karma. And it will all be their fault.
Poor leadership doesn't quite cover it. (Score:5, Insightful)
Being hostile towards regulators that hold your ability to continue operating is just about as bad as leadership can get.
Then again, if they genuinely plan to get back on track and start doing robotaxi service again in the near future, then laying off their operations team was also borderline incompetent. That means in six months or a year, they'll have to rebuild that team from scratch, and the new people will have to figure out how to do everything all over again from the ground up, likely with a early complete loss of institutional knowledge.
So was any part of their incident response not objectively wrong?
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What regulators? Pretty much in the US, if a company is big enough, regulatory capture, and the fact that regulators don't have much power anyway means they can be laughed off for the most part. The only reason this is getting any attention is that people fear and revile AI, so the politicos want to show they are doing something during an election year. Once November rolls around and the results are in, all this will be dropped, and the Cruise cars will be back on the streets, just like Limebike and Bird
Re: Poor leadership doesn't quite cover it. (Score:3)
Re:Poor leadership doesn't quite cover it. (Score:5, Insightful)
Being hostile towards regulators that hold your ability to continue operating is just about as bad as leadership can get.
Then again, if they genuinely plan to get back on track and start doing robotaxi service again in the near future, then laying off their operations team was also borderline incompetent. That means in six months or a year, they'll have to rebuild that team from scratch, and the new people will have to figure out how to do everything all over again from the ground up, likely with a early complete loss of institutional knowledge.
So was any part of their incident response not objectively wrong?
If you're fighting regulators, 99 times out of 100 you're doing something wrong. Regardless of that it never ends well for the people fighting, it's a case of play silly games, win silly prizes.
The fact is the Cruze taxis were terrible and got into a lot of situations a driver would have avoided, like stopping in the middle of an intersection because they didn't know where to go, thus creating a traffic jam.
Right now, I doubt they're ever coming back and the C-levels are just looking for someone, anyone other than themselves to blame for it.
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If you're fighting regulators, 99 times out of 100 you're doing something wrong.
That depends how you're fighting them.
Capturing them works, just give high paying jobs to the ones leaving the regulatory agencies.
Lobbying also works; have barriers put up that make it harder for others to enter your space.
Unusual (Score:3)
An agency that is not yet under regulatory capture [google.com]. Unusual.
The. Tech. Isn't. Ready. Yet (Score:4, Informative)
Let me say it again...
The tech isn't ready yet!
I have no doubt that it will work some day, but releasing very early, poorly performing prototypes into the wild is a bad strategy
Executives may falsely believe that it gives them a first mover advantage, but what it really does is make them look stupid
Re:The. Tech. Isn't. Ready. Yet (Score:5, Informative)
But, it seems to me that waymo is the ones doing it right. 7 million driverless miles and climbing every day.
"This means that over the 7.1 million miles Waymo drove, there were an estimated 17 fewer injuries and 20 fewer police-reported crashes compared to if human drivers with the benchmark crash rate would have driven the same distance in the areas we operate."
https://waymo.com/blog/2023/12... [waymo.com]
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Will still need RC at the drop of a hat not to gridlock a city, fun when phones are down. It's a boondoggle.
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Tech doesn't work. All it can do is create competent looking demos.
Waymo has just taken that demo to the nth degree.
The technology isn't there. The people who say are lying because of they have some vested interest or they are people just parroting what they are hearing and have no clue.
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Re: The. Tech. Isn't. Ready. Yet (Score:2)
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In space you can't hear Karen scream.
Re:The. Tech. Isn't. Ready. Yet (Score:4, Interesting)
If this situation had involved a human driver - that woman would be dead.
Yes it is horrible that the car drug her. But what is constantly ignored is the initial collision - which was entirely the fault of another HUMAN driver - would have been FAR WORSE with a human driver's poor reaction time. She would have surely died.
The reality is that the entire situation was 100% human caused, and the autonomous vehicle saved her life. But that is not a sexy narrative for the media, nor regulators.
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Re: The. Tech. Isn't. Ready. Yet (Score:2)
I am replying to the parent who is saying "the tech isn't ready yet"
There is no threshold where it will be "ready", I'd "ready" means 100% guaranteed to never harm anyone.
The fact is every day we delay deploying these systems, we are directly responsible causing thousands more deaths. That's a fact.
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The reality is that the AI is not (and was not) ready to enter a human area, causing by its presence and actions the catastrophic result we have all seen.
Re: The. Tech. Isn't. Ready. Yet (Score:2)
You really shouldnt comment on things when you obviously have no clue as to the background because it makes you look foolish.
That's not what happened here whatsoever. The woman was hit by a HUMAN driver, and FLUNG INTO THE PATH of the cruise vehicle, which WAS following all of the rules. The vehicle was able to STOP INSTANTLY due to it being autonomous, which indisputably saved the woman's life. At that point though, she had fallen to the road and because the car couldn't see her, she ended up being drug to
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Your argument misses many fundamental points which have been discussed to exhaustion previously, here and elsewhere. It is not new.
Ultimately, I consider it counterproductive to rehash what-if scenarios without basis in actual physical fact. You may find them persuasive yourself, but I
CE-Bro Syndrome (Score:2)
So corporate execs prioritize company and cash over customer safety. I'm shocked. Shocked, I tell you!
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I don't know Cruise's numbers, but Teslas are already orders of magnitude safer than human drivers.
I wish numeracy was a goal of our educational system.
I've said it before (Score:3)
So many of these companies appear to proudly live by the mantra "move fast and break people".
blind idiots (Score:2)
Another self driving company in the dust (Score:2)
Yes that's dramatic, Cruise has a lot of important backers but still, a big setback.
As time goes on it really looks like Waymo's overly cautious and conservative approach is paying off. They're out there doing it offering actual automated rides. It's still a ways off from really hitting level 4 or 5 but I can't think of another company that is closer.
I think Tesla still is in the #2 spot simply because their approach of using in cars on the road is unique.
The real dark horse I am rooting for the comma.ai
Absolutely (Score:3, Informative)
Absolutely spot on, you didn't play nice with the regulators.
Oh, and coincidentally, the cars stopped in the middle of the road, hit people, blocked emergency vehicles and everyone else, and were generally a plague everywhere they went.
Suits 0 : Physics 1 (Score:1)
I'm sure they will figure it out right about the time the oil really runs out. Until then, bleed the foolish and their gold.
How about self-regulation? (Score:5, Funny)
hostility cascade (Score:2)
Big words. Translation: Liars.
Why would anyone expect otherwise? (Score:2)
Companies and regulators are an adversarial relationship. Regulators should insist on certain type and quality of data available after an accident, companies should comply but can't be expected to criticize every aspect of their own performance. If I unfortunately have an accident, I am not expected to tell police officer, DMV and insurance companies all the ways I could have handled it better "oh you know, I was thinking of work and not paying attention, and I could have started breaking earlier...". There