Cruise

the-cruise-origin-driverless-pod-is-dead,-gm-tells-investors

The Cruise Origin driverless pod is dead, GM tells investors

Cars, Cruise, Cruise AV, nhtsa, Origin, robotaxis / /

nobody take the wheel —

The driverless Origin is dead; instead, Cruise will use next-generation Bolt EVs.

–

a rendering of a Cruise Origin picking up passengers in the Castro district in San Francisco

Enlarge / As Cruise ramps up its robotaxi service, it won’t be in these cool-looking driverless pods.

Cruise

The Cruise Origin was definitely the least conventional of all the myriad vehicles that General Motors planned to build using its new Ultium battery platform. For starters, it wasn’t a pickup truck or SUV, unlike all the Ultium-based electric vehicles that have gone into production thus far. Instead, the Origin—meant for Cruise, GM’s robotaxi startup—was a true driverless pod design, a box on wheels with the front and rear seats facing each other and no steering wheel at all. But now the Origin is dead, GM said in a letter to investors today.

We saw the Origin in person in January 2020 at a flashy reveal event that was light on the details. At the time, Cruise was targeting early 2022 to begin deploying Origins, a timeline that accounted for neither pandemic nor the difficulty in actually developing autonomous vehicles.

By early 2022, Cruise was ready to petition the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, asking permission to begin using Origins on the road. But 2023 was a bad year for the autonomous vehicle company, which had its operations in California suspended after a Cruise robotaxi ran over and then dragged a pedestrian in San Francisco.

The challenge of convincing NHTSA that such a radically different design should be given the OK proved too much for GM to bear, it told investors.

Instead of using Origins, Cruise will turn its attention to the next-generation Chevrolet Bolt, which will cost less per unit than the Origin, helpfully. The next-gen Bolt is a revamp of Chevy’s popular compact EV that will move over to the cheaper Ultium battery platform. The Bolt was GM’s bestselling EV but went out of production last year at the Orion Assembly plant in Michigan, which the automaker wanted to repurpose so it could build electric pickup trucks.

Those electric pickups are now on hold, postponed until mid-2026 GM says. Like Ford, it appears that GM miscalculated the appeal of expensive electric trucks, and as a result the company will not meet its originally stated ambition of building a million EVs in 2025.

The Cruise Origin driverless pod is dead, GM tells investors Read More »

cruise-failed-to-disclose-disturbing-details-of-self-driving-car-crash

Cruise failed to disclose disturbing details of self-driving car crash

autonomous vehicles, Cars, Cruise, GM, self-driving, syndication / /

full disclosure —

Company did not share all it knew about the accident with regulators.

–

A Cruise robotaxi test vehicle in San Francisco.

Enlarge / A Cruise robotaxi test vehicle in San Francisco.

Cruise

A law firm hired by the General Motors’ self-driving subsidiary Cruise to investigate the company’s response to a gruesome San Francisco crash last year found that the company failed to fully disclose disturbing details to regulators, the tech company said today in a blog post. The incident in October led California regulators to suspend Cruise’s license to operate driverless vehicles in San Francisco.

The new report by law firm Quinn Emanuel says that Cruise failed to tell California’s Department of Motor Vehicles that after striking a pedestrian knocked into its path by a human-driven vehicle, the autonomous car pulled out of traffic—dragging her some 20 feet. Cruise said it had accepted the firm’s version of events, as well as its recommendations.

The investigators found that when Cruise played a video of the crash taken from its autonomous vehicle for government officials, it did not “verbally point out” the vehicle’s pullover maneuver. Internet connectivity issues that occurred when the company tried to share video of the incident “likely precluded or hampered” regulators from seeing the full video, the report concluded.

Cruise executives are singled out in the report for failing to properly communicate with regulators. Company leaders assumed that regulators would ask questions that would lead the company to provide more information about the pedestrian dragging, the report says. And Cruise leadership is described as “fixated” on demonstrating to the media that it was a human-driven car, not its autonomous vehicle, that first struck the pedestrian. That “myopic focus,” the law firm concludes, led Cruise to “omit other important information” about the incident.

“The reasons for Cruise’s failings in this instance are numerous,” the law firm concluded, “poor leadership, mistakes in judgment, lack of coordination, an ‘us versus them’ mentality with regulators, and a fundamental misapprehension of Cruise’s obligations of accountability and transparency to the government and the public.” It said the company must take “decisive steps” to restore public trust.

Another third-party report on the crash released by Cruise today, by the engineering consulting firm Exponent, found that technical issues contributed to the autonomous vehicle’s dangerous pullover maneuver. Although the self-driving car’s software correctly detected, perceived, and tracked the pedestrian and the human-driven car, it classified the crash as a side-impact collision, which led it to pull over and drag the woman underneath it. Cruise says its technical issues were corrected when it recalled its software in November.

Cruise has paused its self-driving operations across the US since late October. Nine executives, plus CEO and cofounder Kyle Vogt, left in the fallout from the crash. In late 2023, the company laid off almost a quarter of its employees. General Motors says it will cut spending on the tech company by hundreds of millions of dollars this year compared to last.

This story originally appeared on wired.com.

Cruise failed to disclose disturbing details of self-driving car crash Read More »