Written by Ge Yi
Editor / Zhang Nan
Design / Ju Jia
来源 / Automotive News, Bloomberg, Reuters，作者：PETE BIGELOW, GREG BENSINGER, DAVID SHEPARDSON来源 / Autonews，作者：RICHARD TRUETT
In the early hours of Oct. 3, 2023, dozens of General Motors employees became clear for the first time about the Cruise autonomous vehicle crash, which jeopardizes the future of Cruise, General Motors' self-driving subsidiary.
At 3:45 a.m., more than six hours after the crash involving pedestrians, an unidentified Cruise employee asked a disturbing question in a Slack channel called "War Room" with 77 employees who shared a link to the crash video.
"Pedestrians were under the car as it continued to move," the employee asked. "Am I right?"
Matthew Wood, Cruise's director of system integrity, responded. In a Jan. 25 investigative report released by the law firm Quinn Emanuel, Wood said: "I think so. ”
The agency is employed by General Motors and Cruise to investigate the handling of the accident and its aftermath. For the investigation, the agency interviewed 88 employees and contractors and reviewed more than 200,000 internal documents.
The accident occurred at an intersection in San Francisco on October 2, 2023. The self-driving car, which Cruise calls Panini, hits a pedestrian who was knocked down by a human-driven vehicle. Panini stopped after detecting the impact, but incorrectly classified the accident as a side impact and initiated a pullover maneuver, causing the woman to be caught between the wheels and dragged 20 feet (about 6.1 meters) at a speed of 11 km/h, causing "multiple serious injuries."
An independent technical review report conducted by Exponent Engineering accompanying the Emanuel report showed that the causal factors identified and described by Exponent were consistent with Cruise's own internal analysis of the incident.
First, the autonomous vehicle accurately detected, classified, and tracked both the pedestrian and the human-driven vehicle prior to the first collision between a human-driven vehicle and a pedestrian, second, the subsequent vehicle-pedestrian collision was caused by the human-driven vehicle launching the individual into the AV's driving path, and third, the vehicle incorrectly classified the collision with the pedestrian as a side impact, which caused the vehicle to perform a subsequent pullover maneuver (to the outermost lane) instead of an emergency stop. In addition, while not the main reason for moving after parking, the failure to recognize that the vehicle is already in the outermost lane is a contributing factor.
The re-movement of the vehicle after it has stopped, as well as Cruise's allegations that it concealed its existence from regulators, formed the basis for the indefinite suspension of the company's driverless license by the California DVM (Department of Motor Vehicles).
Emmanuel found that "the evidence does not prove that Cruise employees intentionally misled regulators about issues such as stop-and-move and pedestrian dragging." ”
The report noted that key video footage could not be played for regulators in three separate meetings due to technology and connectivity issues.
However, Aaron Peskin, chairman of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, said the claim of technical difficulties "feels a bit far-fetched." Peskin has been advocating for more control over Robotaxi deployments on the ground. "They have the best technology in the world, but when they communicate about some issues, they have recurring technical difficulties. ”
Emanuel's report further found that Cruise executives, including then-CEO Kyle Vogt, were unaware of the rapidly deteriorating crisis for days before the company suspended operations.
So how did the once-$30 billion, ambitious self-driving technology company handle and misread a crisis that threatened its future?
The signs of the crisis are early on
The accident occurred at 9:29 p.m. local time on Oct. 2, and within seconds of detecting the accident, the car automatically sent a computer video recording to Cruise's remote assistance team in Arizona. Here's the video Wood watched and admitted six hours later.
Emmanuel's report said Cruise contractors dispatched to the crash site by an internal incident response team took more than 100 photographs showing "blood and skin patches on the ground," as well as "blood on the street," which apparently indicated that Cruise had "moved from the initial point of impact to the final stop."
It is important for Cruise leadership to understand and communicate the time frame for information about the additional movement of the car, and this point in time is 12:53 a.m. On Oct. 3, the company issued a press release blaming the accident on a human-driven car, not mentioning the vehicle moving again or being dragged by a pedestrian, but instead stating that "the self-driving vehicle comes to a complete stop immediately after hitting a pedestrian." ”
Later that morning, it became clear to Cruise senior leaders and engineers that the claims in the press release were incorrect.
Cruise COO Gil West and CPO Dan Kan, both now out of Cruise, are among the more than 100 people who knew the inside story at 6 a.m. At the meeting, the crisis management team reportedly discussed the matter of stopping and then moving.
In addition to the video, an engineer who did not identify himself in the report wrote that from the photos taken at the scene, even ordinary bystanders could prove that the car moved after the initial stop. The engineer wrote on the news group: "It is foreseeable that the DMV will be fully aware of the whole details. ”
Technology fails at critical moments
This process of understanding took a while. Officials from Cruise and DMV held their first meeting on Oct. 3 at 11:30 a.m. regarding the crash. At that meeting, Wood showed a "full video" of the vehicle's movement after it stopped.
Emmanuel reported that there was a problem with the network connection that caused the video to stutter and go black in key segments, including after the initial impact. This was the third time Wood had encountered such a technical issue that morning.
He showed the video at 10:05 a.m. during Wood's meeting with the mayor of San Francisco's transportation adviser, which also had internet connection issues, the report said. In addition, technical difficulties, including "stuttering and blackout screens on key segments," plagued the 10:30 a.m. meeting with NHTSA (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration) representatives.
None of Cruise's executives mentioned post-stop movement or pedestrian towing at any of those meetings, the report said.
By the afternoon, the technical glitch had finally been resolved, and the impact was staggering. The full video was played out at 3:30 p.m. during a meeting with San Francisco Municipal Transit Agency representatives and first responders, the report said.
Emmanuel said an official from the San Francisco Fire Department asked Cruise's representatives to replay the video six times. Another officer asked, "The car is moving, there's a woman underneath, is that what we saw?" The answer to Cruise is yes.
Relations with regulators deteriorated
According to the report, even as awareness of vehicle movement after parking increased on the afternoon of Oct. 3, Cruise officials did not mention it in their reports to NHTSA in the afternoon, nor in conversations with DMVs or CHPs (California Highway Patrol).
Exactly a week later, DMV learned about it from another agency and asked Cruise for video. Cruise responded, but did not initially provide video. It took another three days. This will be followed by meetings on October 13 and October 16, the report said.
By then, exactly two weeks after the accident, documents show that Cruise's relationship with regulators had become strained, with disagreements over what had or was not shared.
In an Oct. 16 conversation, a CHP official told Prashanthi Raman, then Cruise's vice president of global government affairs, that they felt like they were being "bombed." In another conversation on the same day, Rahman said to his colleagues in the group of messages mentioned in the report: "If we try to hide this, it will not benefit anyone." ”
These concerns came as a surprise to colleagues. Raman wrote in the message group that DMV and CHP believe that the video they ended up sharing was different from what they initially saw on Oct. 3.
Later, CEO Vogt expressed frustration with the disconnect between Raman's government affairs team and state institutions. Statements and actions taken at the time were often listed separately in Emmanuel's reports. "I'm very struggling with the fact that our GA team didn't take the initiative to provide the DMV with information about the vehicles moving again," Raman wrote. "At some point, we made a bad judgment. "But it will take another week to become apparent.
The license was revoked and the company was suspended
Although they expressed surprise at the growing dissatisfaction with the DMV and CHP, Cruise's leadership did not understand its gravity or importance.
On the evening of October 16, Jose Alvarado, senior manager of government affairs, noted on a message group that DMV wants to "wrap up" consideration of crashes to expand its driverless commercial operations as soon as possible before discussing the "progressive plan" submitted by the company.
On Oct. 23, Raman called Cruise's political adviser because she wanted to know why the DMV had not responded to a request to scale up, the report said. It was that afternoon that Raman and Cruise learned for the first time that DMV could soon revoke two driverless permits necessary for the company to conduct autonomous driving.
Vogt quickly learned about the rapid spread of the crisis and made a distress call to DMV Director Steve Gordon.
Cruise CEO Vogt also made a personal appeal. "Is this what we want to do for this industry? Suspend permits based on man-made accidents," he pleaded. Vogt said he "has been committed to trying to improve driver safety since he was 13 years old."
The phone call and call didn't have the slightest effect, and the next day, Oct. 24, the California DMV suspended Cruise's driverless permit, noting that Cruise had failed to disclose in the morning conference after the incident that the Cruise autonomous vehicle had moved forward and dragged pedestrians after the initial impact.
In December 2023, the California Public Utilities Commission said Cruise had misled the commission "through omissions" about the scope and severity of the accident by not fully disclosing the details of the accident and "misleading the public for comment" in its interactions with the agency.
Cruise has now laid off nine executives in connection with the October crash, with the company's CEO Kyle Vogt and the company's co-founder and CPO Dan Kan both resigning. Cruise also said in December that it would lay off 24% of its workforce. As a result, the company requested that the hearing scheduled for Feb. 6 be postponed to seek an alternative dispute resolution model.
A direct result of self-harm
Even before the accident, Cruise was plagued by a series of problems, suspending all of its self-driving operations in the U.S. after its license to test and deploy autonomous vehicles was revoked, abandoning its ambition to deploy in 15 cities around the world in hopes of one day resuming service at an as-yet-undetermined location.
The circumstances of the pedestrian who was hit are unknown. Cruise offered to pay $75,000 on Jan. 26 to close California regulators' investigation into the details of the pedestrian crash, but the California Public Utilities Commission is seeking harsher penalties.
At the same time, Emanuel's report was accompanied by an appendix that was a technical analysis of the crash conducted by Exponent. Exponent's analysis is 86 pages long, but dozens of pages contain redacted information. Some are almost completely blacked out.
Exponent's analysis focuses on identifying the technical root causes and enablers related to the overall behavior, reactions, and actions of autonomous vehicles during accidents. The causal factors identified and described by Exponent are consistent with Cruise's own internal analysis of the incident.
Emanuel's report said the entire incident was "a direct result of the well-known self-harm of certain Crews' leadership and employees, who do not seem to fully understand how a regulated business should interact with regulators." The report noted that a Cruise employee said in a text message that the company's "leaders have let us down." ”
"There are many reasons why Cruise failed in this incident: poor leadership, errors of judgment, lack of coordination and a confrontational mindset of regulators, and a fundamental misunderstanding of the accountability and transparency obligations of governments and the public. The report concludes, "Cruise must take decisive steps to address these issues to restore trust and credibility." ”
In a Jan. 25 blog post, Cruise said it accepted the report's findings and said it would cooperate with investigations by the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission to develop a more robust process for working with regulators.