Self-driving car maker Cruise is gradually restarting operations in California following an October 2023 incident in which a pedestrian was struck and dragged about 20 feet by a robotaxi. The company posted on X that it would reintroduce human-operated mapping vehicles to the streets of Mountain View and Sunnyvale, saying its next goal is to “progress to surveillance testing with up to five autonomous vehicles later this fall.”
The past year has not been good for Cruise, which was acquired by GM in 2016. On October 2nd of last year, a pedestrian was hit in San Francisco by a human driver, who fled the scene, but the collision put her in the path of Cruise’s driverless taxi, which dragged her for 20 feet before finally coming to rest on top of her feet. Following this incident, Cruise was stripped of its license to operate self-driving cars in California. The company has suspended all operations of both its driverless cars and its driverless robot taxi service to conduct a comprehensive safety review.
CEO Kyle Vogt resigned in November, followed by co-founder and chief product officer Daniel Kang. GM announced plans to cut funding to Cruise and restructure its management team following an external safety review. Nine Cruise executives were fired in December, and the company also cut about a quarter of its workforce that same month. The final blow came in January 2024 when the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission launched an investigation into whether the company failed to disclose additional details about the accident during its review with regulators.
But since then, Cruise has been slowly recovering. Chauffeur-driven vehicles returned to Arizona in April and Houston in June. The Texas re-emergence was coupled with GM announcing that it would invest $850 million to help Cruise’s operating costs. Now, Cruise is back in the California market, albeit on a much reduced scale. All these new efforts are preliminary, and not a single self-driving car is back on the road yet. But Cruise still has a long way to go to prove its safety and regain public trust.
