Cruise, GM’s autonomous driving affiliate, said Thursday that federal prosecutors and securities regulators have opened investigations into the Oct. 2 incident that left a pedestrian pinned down and then swept away by one of its robots.
The investigations by the Ministry of Justice and the Capital Market Commission, which were revealed as part of a internal reference Conducted by the law firm Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan and released Thursday, it joins several other investigations at nearly every level of government, including the California Department of Motor Vehicles, the California Public Utilities Commission and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
The Oct. 2 incident — and decisions by Cruise’s leadership in the following days — put the company’s future in jeopardy, forcing GM to cut costs and take more control of the troubled company. Cruise lost the licenses it needed to operate commercially in the state of California and has since docked its fleet elsewhere. Co-founder and CEO Kyle Vogt resigned and nearly 24% of its workforce was laid off in the wake of the event.
Cruise’s problems began almost immediately after it received the last remaining license to operate its robotaxi service commercially throughout San Francisco. But it was the October 2nd incident and the decisions and communication that immediately followed that sent the company into freefall.
On that day, a pedestrian crossing a street in San Francisco was first hit by a human-driven car and landed in the path of a Cruise robot taxi and crashed into it. A few days later, the media and some regulators learned that the stopped robotaxi then tried to drift away, dragging the pedestrian 20 feet. It was this lack of disclosure — along with the robotaxi’s decision to perform a dangerous maneuver — that escalated Cruise’s already testy relationship with regulators.
The California DMV, which regulates the testing and development of autonomous vehicles in the state, accused Cruise of withholding video from its investigation, prompting the agency to suspend its licenses.
That video, and whether it was intentionally withheld, was a central question in the review conducted by Quinn Emanuel. The law firm, which was hired by GM, concluded that Cruise did not intentionally mislead regulators. Instead, a lack of judgement, mistakes by leadership, an “us versus them” relationship with regulators and fixation Correcting the media’s inaccurate narrative that the Cruise AV, not the human-powered Nissan, had caused the accident were all contributing factors to Cruise’s problems, according to the 195-page report.
“This myopic focus led Cruise to relay the information about the Nissan driver who caused the accident to the media, regulators and other government officials, but omit other important information about the accident. Even after obtaining the Full Video, Cruz did not correct the public narrative, but continued to share incomplete facts and videos about the accident with the media and the public. This behavior has prompted both regulators and the media to accuse Cruise of misleading them.”
Curiously, the Quinn Emanuel report focuses less on the technology, which caused the vehicle to pull over and drag the pedestrian, and more on what happened after October 2nd. At one point, the report calls the loss of DMV permits “a proverbial wound inflicted by some senior Cruise executives and employees who appear not to have fully appreciated how a regulated business should interact with its regulators.”
Quinn Emanuel said that as of Oct. 3, more than 100 Cruise employees, including some senior members of senior leadership, the policy, legal, government affairs and systems integrity teams were told before their meetings with regulators that Cruise AV had forward after the initial impact of the pedestrian and, in doing so, carried the pedestrian approximately 20 feet.
Instead of explicitly describing to regulators what happened, Cruise employees just played the full video in those meetings, including several times when the Internet connection may have hindered or prevented them from seeing it in its entirety.
“Because Cruz took this approach, she did not verbally address these facts. This is because Cruise assumed that by playing the full video of the accident for regulators and other government officials, they would ask questions and Cruise would provide further information about the pullover maneuver and the pedestrian drag,” the report states.
The report also found that some of the most critical leaders at Cruise, including Vogt, Chief Legal Officer Jeff Bleich and COO Gil West, appeared to respond when the DMV suspended the licenses.
In Slack messages reviewed by Quinn Emanuel and highlighted in the report, Vogt expressed his frustration with the DMV Suspension Order, writing “I am struggling immensely with the fact that our GA team did not volunteer the information regarding the secondary traffic with the DMV, and that during the handling of the incident I remember getting inconsistent reports of what was communicated. There must have been a bad judgment at some point and I want to know how that happened.”
The report notes that Slack messages between Bleich, West and Vogt “convey that the company’s three senior leaders — the CEO, CLO and COO — were not actively involved in the regulatory response to the worst accident in Cruise history. Instead, they were trying to piece together what happened after the fact.”
