Robotaxi firm Cruise has been accused of a failure of leadership and an us-versus-them mentality in the days following the October 2023 accident in which a pedestrian was seriously injured.

The accident in San Francisco saw the pedestrian dragged about six metres following a collision and resulted in California suspending Cruise’s driverless permit.

Cruise has now released the Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan report regarding the incident and Cruise’s subsequent interactions with regulators and the media. Quinn Emanuel’s review included interviews with 88 Cruise employees and contractors as well as review of over 200,000 internal Cruise documents.

The incident started when a hit-and-run driver struck a pedestrian and launched her into the lane of travel of a Cruise AV, which unavoidably struck her. The Cruise AV, determining the collision to be a side impact with the pedestrian rather than frontal, pulled forward approximately two metres and dragged the individual in the process. This caused serious injury.

The California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) suspended Cruise’s driverless permits, stating in part that Cruise failed to disclose in a meeting on the morning after the incident that the Cruise AV had pulled forward after the initial impact and dragged the pedestrian.

Quinn Emanuel ascribes this to a failure of leadership within Cruise, inadequate and uncoordinated internal processes, mistakes in judgment, an us-versus-them mentality with government officials, and a fundamental misunderstanding of regulatory requirements and expectations.

The report found the evidence did not establish that Cruise leadership or personnel intended to deceive or mislead regulators during the oral briefings. The review shows Cruise played, or attempted to play, a 45-second, nine-pane video depicting the AV’s pullover manoeuvre, where the AV pulled forward, resulting in the dragging of the pedestrian. However, the report concludes that Cruise did not verbally point out these facts to regulators or government officials in its meetings, despite video transmission issues that impeded or prevented regulators from seeing the pullover manoeuvre and pedestrian dragging.

Additionally, the review found in the immediate hours after the incident, Cruise employees were not yet aware of the AV’s pullover manoeuvre or dragging at the time it issued its initial press statement and began screen-sharing an early video with journalists. However, the review also shows Cruise failed to update the press statement or share the full video once it became aware of these facts. Quinn Emanuel attributes this to a myopic focus on correcting the initial inaccurate media narrative that the Cruise AV, rather than the human driver, had caused the incident.

Despite the failure to discuss the pullover manoeuvre or pedestrian dragging with regulators, the evidence reviewed to date does not establish that Cruise leadership or employees sought intentionally to mislead or hide from regulators the details of the accident. Instead, they attempted to show the full video of the accident in good faith, but with varying degrees of success due to technical issues.

The report said the DMV suspension order was a direct result of a self-inflicted wound by certain senior Cruise leadership and employees who appeared not to have fully appreciated how a regulated business should interact with its regulators. It said this was a fundamentally flawed approach for Cruise to take the position that a video of an accident causing serious injury provided all necessary information to regulators and otherwise relieved them of the need to inform affirmatively and fully these regulators of all relevant facts.

Cruise accepts Quinn Emanuel’s conclusions and says it will act on all the recommendations.

“We acknowledge that we have failed to live up to the justifiable expectations of regulators and the communities we serve,” said a Cruise statement. “In doing so, we also fell woefully short of our own expectations. We are profoundly remorseful both for the injuries to the pedestrian, as well as for breaching the trust of our regulators, the media and the public. We are fully cooperating with the state and federal regulatory and enforcement agencies which have opened investigations or inquiries in connection with the incident.”

Cruise has voluntarily paused all its nationwide driverless, supervised and manual AV driving operations to take time to examine its processes, systems and tools, and improve how it operates.

Following Cruise’s response to the incident, nine individuals left Cruise in December, including leaders from legal, government affairs, commercial operations, and safety and systems. In addition, Cruise’s CEO, chief product officer and vice president of communications have departed since the incident.

Cruise hired engineering consulting firm Exponent to conduct a root cause analysis of the incident.

It found that leading up to the initial collision between the human-driven vehicle and pedestrian, the AV accurately detected, classified and tracked both the pedestrian and the human-driven vehicle. Secondly, the subsequent collision of the AV with the pedestrian was caused by the individual being launched into the AV’s path of travel by the human-driven vehicle. Thirdly, the AV incorrectly classified the collision with the pedestrian as a side-impact collision, which led the AV to perform a subsequent pullover manoeuvre to the outermost lane instead of an emergency stop. In addition, while not a leading cause of the pullover movement, a semantic mapping error that failed to recognise that the AV was already in the outermost lane was a contributing factor.

Based on its internal analysis, Cruise has updated the software to address the underlying issues and filed a voluntary recall with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in November.

“We are constantly working to improve performance of our AV technology in consultation with third-party experts,” said the Cruise statement. “We believe that, over time, autonomous vehicles can significantly reduce the number and severity of car collisions which result in more than 40,000 deaths on US roads each year. This is what motivates our work. We know our licence to operate must be earned and is ultimately granted by regulators and the communities we serve. We are focused on advancing our technology and earning back public trust.”

The full Quinn Emanual report can be found at: assets.ctfassets.net/95kuvdv8zn1v/1mb55pLYkkXVn0nXxEXz7w/9fb0e4938a89dc5cc09bf39e86ce5b9c/2024.01.24_Quinn_Emanuel_Report_re_Cruise.pdf.