Not a good day for Cruise, the autonomous vehicle company run by General Motors. Today California regulators announced they were shutting down the company’s ability to operate the driverless cars as taxis in San Francisco.

The California Department of Motor Vehicles has suspended Cruise from operating its driverless taxis in San Francisco, effective immediately.

The DMV, one of the state’s regulators for self-driving cars, said there is no timeline for the suspension. At this time, the DMV says the suspension of Cruise’s autonomous operations is based on the determination that “the manufacturer’s vehicles are not safe for the public’s operation.”…

Cruise and Waymo both received regulatory approval in August to commercially operate their robotaxis at all hours in San Francisco. However, the DMV ordered Cruise to cut its fleet in half a week after its approved expansion as it investigated recent crashes involving Cruise robotaxis.

Cruise robotaxis have been involved in two accidents recently both of which generated a lot of attention. The first happened in mid-August and involved a collision between a firetruck and a Cruise. In that case, the Cruise taxi had a green light at the intersection but a firetruck was attempting to go through the same intersection on its way to an emergency by driving into oncoming lanes of traffic. A human driver would have known to stop or get out of the way of the truck but apparently the Cruise became confused. There was a passenger in the car at the time of the accident.

The second accident which probably led to this regulatory decision was far more serious. It was initially reported as if an empty Cruise vehicle had driven over a woman in an intersection. When first responders arrived, they found a woman trapped under the rear axle of the Cruise vehicle and because no one was in the vehicle there was no one to ask about what had happened. But it later turned out there was more to this story.

Exclusive:

The Chronicle has obtained photos of the pedestrian trapped under the Cruise self-driving car.

The woman was thrown into the path of the Cruise by a hit-and-run driver, officials say.

By @jparkerwrites & Nora Mishanec https://t.co/ijF1knX61R pic.twitter.com/jBPtgL4wVU

— Demian Bulwa (@demianbulwa) October 3, 2023

Dashcam video from the Cruise car revealed what had happened. This is from a statement released by Cruise.

The incident occurred on October 2, 2023 at 9:29 PM PDT in San Francisco. A Cruise AV named Panini, operating in driverless autonomous mode, was at a complete stop at a red light. A dark colored Nissan Sentra was stopped in the adjacent lane to the left of the AV. When the light turned green, the Nissan Sentra and the AV entered the intersection. Against a red light, a pedestrian entered the crosswalk on the opposite side of Market Street across from the vehicles, passed completely through the AV’s lane of travel, then stopped mid-crosswalk in front of the Nissan Sentra. The Nissan Sentra then tragically struck and propelled the pedestrian into the path of the AV. The AV biased rightward before braking aggressively, but still made contact with the pedestrian. The AV detected a collision, bringing the vehicle to a stop; then attempted to pull over to avoid causing further road safety issues, pulling the individual forward approximately 20 feet. The driver of the Nissan Sentra fled the scene after the collision.

So this was actually a hit and run by a human driver who fled the scene. However, the Cruise vehicle didn’t just stop, it tried to move itself out of the way and wound up driving over the injured woman. Again this is from Cruise:

After a collision, Cruise AVs are designed to perform a maneuver to minimize the safety risks to the extent possible within the driving context. This is called achieving a minimal risk condition, and it’s required under California regulations and encouraged under Federal AV guidance. The specific maneuver, such as coming to an immediate stop, pulling over out of lane of travel, or pulling out of traffic after exiting an intersection, is highly dependent on the driving context as well as the Cruise AV’s driving capabilities in the moment.

My own take here is that a human driver who had witnessed a hit and run and even impacted a victim after the fact (or even thought they might have) would have stopped and gotten out of the car to assess the situation. Their first “thought” would not have been to clear the road per government regulations. But it sounds like the Cruise just did what it was supposed to and in the process dragged this woman down the street. So it’s fair to say Cruise didn’t initially cause this accident but it’s also fair to say the car made it worse. Cruise promised to do better next time.

This incident will be included in future suites of simulation tests to allow the vehicle to better determine if it should pull over safely or stay in place, and to validate that the AV’s behavior remains safe and reasonable. We aim to continuously learn and improve AV behavior, and in developing new simulation tests and rare scenarios, we can assess multiple variations of this type of incident and increase the robustness of the AV’s response.

If a human driver had driven over a person in the street after an accident, they would probably go to jail and eventually lose their license to drive. That’s effectively what California just did to Cruise, it pulled their license to operate. I do think robotaxis will be the norm in most places much sooner than most people think, but clearly we’re not quite there yet. There are some unusual situations where a human driver is still better.