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Cruise, the self-driving car division of General Motors, has issued a recall for its fleet of 1,194 cars. This is to fix a long-standing problem with unexpected braking. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration closed its nearly 2-year investigation into the issue after Cruise sent software updates to the affected vehicles.
Cruise can now relax, as the investigation and recall are over. This comes at a time of intense scrutiny for the company. The Department of Justice and Securities and Exchange Commission are still investigating the company after one of its robotaxis hit a pedestrian last fall. (The pedestrian was hit by a human driven car before the Cruise Robotaxi ran her over.)
Cruise has undergone a lot of changes since then. It has lost its permits to operate on California roads, grounded its entire U.S. Fleet, replaced its founder, and a number other leaders, and most recently abandoned it’s purpose-built autonomous car, the Origin. Cruise reached an agreement with California’s Public Utilities Commission to resume its robotaxi service.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration began its investigation into Cruise’s problems with hard braking in December 2022. The regulator claims that it has examined 7,632 hard braking events over the past two years. However, only 10 crashes were identified where Cruise vehicles “contributed” to the crash. Four of these involved a “vulnerable user and resulted into an injury.”
The problem appears to have occurred when Cruise’s autopilot system incorrectly predicted the route of a car in front of the robotaxi. Other cars too close to Cruise AV sensors could also cause hard braking. NHTSA says that Cruise’s software upgrades have improved the robotaxis’ perception and planning. Cruise demonstrated to NHTSA in February that its robotaxis’ rate of hard braking was “much less than a human driving.”
This is not Cruise’s first recall of AVs. In 2023, after one of the company’s robotaxis crashed into an city bus in San Francisco, the company updated their autonomous software. The year before, Cruise recalled robotaxis following a crash that occurred while making an unprotected turn.