00:00 Hi everyone, I'm Rose Marie Miller here with Sirruz Farvar, a senior writer here at Forbes
00:08 here to tell us about why cruise robo taxis halted operations nationwide.
00:14 Thank you so much for joining me today.
00:17 Thank you for having me.
00:18 Absolutely.
00:19 So first, just give us like a brief overview of what happened.
00:23 Yeah, so it's been quite a busy several weeks for cruise over the last, I would say, month
00:32 to two months maybe.
00:34 But yes, what you're referring to really stems from an incident that took place not too far
00:39 from where I am right now.
00:41 I live in Oakland, California.
00:43 This incident happened October 2nd in San Francisco.
00:46 And at the time, Cruise was running its driverless cars in San Francisco, picking up passengers,
00:53 sort of like a ride hail type service.
00:57 And what happened was almost kind of a freak accident.
00:59 There was a woman, a pedestrian, who was hit by a human driven car.
01:04 And then shortly after the moment of impact, she was thrown into an adjacent lane and set
01:10 directly into the path of a cruise car.
01:14 And she was then not only hit by that cruise car, but was actually dragged approximately
01:19 20 feet by that cruise car before it came to a stop.
01:23 The woman remains in the hospital to this day, more than a month after that incident.
01:29 The next day, October 3rd, cruise officials had meetings with state officials from around
01:36 here in California, the Department of Motor Vehicles, the California Highway Patrol, and
01:40 some others.
01:42 Ultimately, eventually, the California DMV decided to revoke Cruise's operating permit
01:49 across the state.
01:51 Cruise had been testing vehicles in other cities, including Los Angeles and San Diego.
01:56 And then very shortly after that, just late last month, the company decided to pull all
02:00 of its driverless cars nationwide.
02:02 So that would include locations in Texas and Arizona, and really put on hold the company's
02:08 very ambitious plans to expand to numerous cities nationwide.
02:12 Okay, well, the California DMV, they made the decision to revoke their permits, but
02:17 this was only in California.
02:19 Have there been like other incidents before the major incident where the lady was dragged
02:24 20 feet, unfortunately?
02:27 So you're right.
02:28 There have not been, to my knowledge, any serious physical injuries to a person in other
02:33 cities outside of California involving cruise cars.
02:36 However, there have been numerous instances reported in other places where cars have behaved
02:43 unpredictably or erratically or caused traffic jams or other kind of more minor type of incidents.
02:49 I'm thinking of Austin, Texas, for example, where during a music festival, a number of
02:55 cars sort of congregated into a single location, backing up traffic as a result of a local
03:02 festival.
03:04 And there have been reports even prior to this very serious accident here in San Francisco,
03:10 there were also numerous incidences that I reported on for Forbes about how the San Francisco
03:15 Fire Department had documented several dozen instances where a cruise and Waymo cars, which
03:21 continue to operate here in San Francisco, where those cars had disrupted first responders,
03:28 specifically police and fire, and had done things like blocked access to firehouses,
03:33 had run over fire hoses, had gone through emergency perimeters and various kinds of
03:38 behaviors that the first responders felt were not conducive to public safety.
03:44 So those entities in San Francisco, even prior to this October 2nd incident, had asked California
03:51 regulators to slow down in terms of their approval for allowing the company to operate
04:00 driverlessly statewide.
04:01 Ultimately, the California Public Utilities Commission, which is the state entity that
04:05 regulates passenger fare, so taxis and Ubers and things like that, and ultimately cruise
04:11 as well, allowed them to operate in an August vote.
04:17 And then just several weeks later, in early October, we had this incident that we've been
04:21 talking about.
04:23 And aside from halting its operations nationwide, what has been Cruise's response to the situation?
04:30 So it's been a very difficult couple of weeks for Cruise.
04:33 I just reported yesterday, November 8th, for Forbes.
04:37 This was an article entitled "Crisis at Cruise.
04:39 RoboTaxi CEO Confirms Coming Layoffs Amid Scramble to Rebuild Public Trust."
04:44 So the company is really kind of in a crisis mode right now.
04:47 I obtained audio that was leaked to me earlier this week of Cruise's all-hands meeting that
04:54 took place on Monday, where they talked about how they were going to do layoffs.
04:59 Whereas today, Thursday, November 9th, the company announced that it would be terminating
05:03 immediately some contracted workers.
05:06 The company did not say how many exactly, but we understand that these are people who
05:10 work on cleaning cars and doing other kinds of less like computer programming, but more
05:18 interacting with the cars themselves and prepping them for rides, which to me suggests that
05:22 the company does not believe that they're going to be restarting their program here
05:26 in California anytime soon.
05:28 So here in California or at all nationwide?
05:31 Well, again, we don't know precisely.
05:34 But what we do know is that General Motors, which is of course is Cruise's parent company,
05:40 has spent billions of dollars on the company over the years.
05:44 The company Cruise is about 10 years old.
05:46 But this year, 2023, was supposed to be the year that they were really going to be commercially
05:51 deploying.
05:52 So roughly a year ago, CEO Kyle Vogt said multiple times that by the end of 2023, they
05:59 expected to be operating in 10 cities across America.
06:02 But given their setbacks here in California and given the problems that have been recorded,
06:10 that plan is certainly in jeopardy right now.
06:12 So of all the technological advancements that have been promised over the last decade, why
06:17 has self-driving cars been one of the hardest for companies to actually accomplish?
06:22 It's a really good question.
06:25 I think it's been a challenge because if you've driven even a little bit, if you've driven
06:34 a car at any time, you know that it's a very dynamic situation.
06:39 There's things moving every which way.
06:41 And at any moment, this is what they teach you in driver's ed when you're younger, at
06:45 any moment, anything can change, right?
06:47 A kid can come run out in the street, the thing could fall, who knows?
06:50 You got to be kind of on your toes all the time.
06:52 And we talk about distracted driving all the time.
06:55 And certainly humans make mistakes.
06:58 I think one of the things that these companies are realizing is that while in predictable
07:05 controlled situations, driving down a straight street with few turns and predictable behavior,
07:14 that's generally pretty good most of the time.
07:18 But these computers and these machines and these software rely on what they call training
07:23 data, right?
07:24 So they rely on basically telling their computer program, OK, here's what you should expect.
07:30 Here's how fast things move, things of that nature, right?
07:34 It seems that they had not predicted what people sometimes refer to as, quote, "long
07:40 tail events," right?
07:41 So rare events such as a woman getting hit in the lane next to you and being tossed in
07:46 front of your cruise car, right?
07:48 It doesn't seem like they had anticipated that situation.
07:51 And frankly, I, in my, you know, I don't know, decades of driving have never, fortunately,
07:56 never seen that in real life.
07:58 So that's like a pretty rare and unusual situation to be sure.
08:03 So I think that those problems and accounting for all of those different situations that
08:10 could occur are very, very difficult.
08:13 That's not to say that they're impossible, but I think that the companies are learning
08:17 that these are very difficult challenges and they have spent collectively, not just Cruise
08:23 and not just General Motors, but their rival companies, right?
08:26 Google's arm called Waymo, Amazon's arm called Zoox, and a number of other companies that
08:31 have sort of already risen and fallen and that are maybe less well-known, right?
08:36 Many, many billions of dollars, tens of billions of dollars, possibly as much as $100 billion
08:40 has been spent collectively on this technology in recent years.
08:45 And right now, it's only limited to operating in San Francisco by Waymo cars open to the
08:51 public.
08:52 So why are some states or cities more open to self-driving cars, just testing this out
08:58 than others?
08:59 Yeah, it's a good question.
09:01 I mean, I think the industry as a whole has lobbied for some states, states generally,
09:08 but some states, including California, including Texas, Arizona, and others, to allow this
09:14 technology on their roads.
09:16 And you can imagine, right, it's a tricky balance of trying to balance public safety
09:23 with the interest in being open and being available and flexible to accommodate newer
09:31 technologies.
09:32 But at the same time, no governor, no mayor, no police chief, no fire chief wants to be
09:36 the one to have to tell the public, hey, we allow these cars on our roads and something
09:41 awful happened, right?
09:42 And so I think that what local leaders are finding is that maybe it's not quite as ready
09:51 for prime time as maybe some of the companies had led them to believe.
09:55 Waymo, of course, does continue to operate in San Francisco and does continue to operate
09:59 in Phoenix, Arizona as well.
10:02 But Waymo, unlike Cruise, has been, in terms of their behavior, has been much more conservative
10:08 about where they're expanding to, how they're doing what they're doing.
10:15 They are currently testing, I know, in other parts of California and Los Angeles and other
10:18 places as well.
10:21 But I think that it'll be interesting to see if these companies really can make this a
10:26 widespread commercially viable product.
10:28 Right now, the record is spotty.
10:32 So in your opinion, where do you think self-driving cars will be in the next five years?
10:37 Yeah, it's hard to say.
10:39 I feel like self-driving cars is one of those technologies that is always three years away,
10:43 and that's been true for a decade.
10:45 So it's hard to say.
10:47 But you do see them, right?
10:49 If you were to come to San Francisco, you would see them on the street.
10:51 And people certainly turn their heads.
10:54 But I feel like in some parts of the city, they become so commonplace that you don't
10:58 even notice them anymore.
10:59 And prior to Cruise's shutdown, you would see them very commonly.
11:03 That's not to say that everyone loves them, but that they are becoming just a part of
11:09 the background noise of the city.
11:12 So will they become commercially viable?
11:15 It's hard to say.
11:16 I think Cruise's setbacks recently and the way the California DMV has said that they're
11:23 not safe right now.
11:25 And I think that that investigation is ongoing.
11:27 I know NHTSA, the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration, a federal agency, is
11:33 continuing its investigation as well.
11:35 But you have many local critics from here, from San Francisco.
11:39 I mentioned the fire department.
11:41 There's also local supervisors, which in other cities are called city council members, and
11:46 many others that have talked about some of their concerns.
11:50 So I'm not sure if this is commercially viable.
11:54 We will see.
11:55 America, as you know, is a very big place with a lot of different cultures and communities
11:59 and climates.
12:02 That they're operating only in somewhat warm climates, California and Texas and Arizona,
12:07 I think is very telling.
12:08 I'm not 100% sure that these cars would operate well in a really wet climate or a really snowy
12:14 climate or something like that.
12:16 Not to mention a huge city like New York City or Chicago or Washington, D.C. or somewhere
12:21 like that.
12:22 But we will find out.
12:23 Wow, that's really interesting.
12:25 Well, thank you so much for joining me today.
12:28 Thank you.
12:29 Absolutely.
12:31 [BLANK_AUDIO]
Comments