Cyrus Farivar, a senior writer for Forbes, joins ‘Forbes Talks’ to discuss Cruise robotaxis halting operations nationwide. The stunning announcement comes just two days after California regulators revoked the company’s permit statewide, finding that Cruise’s vehicles are “not safe for the public’s operation” and that the cars pose “an unreasonable risk to the public.”
After ceasing operations in California on Tuesday, Cruise continued in Phoenix, Arizona, and in Austin and Houston, two of Texas’ largest cities. However, the entire robotaxi fleet nationwide has now been grounded.
In its brief thread, Cruise said that the company needed to “take steps to rebuild public trust…even if it means doing things that are uncomfortable or difficult.”
Earlier this month, at its peak, Cruise had a fleet of 400 robotaxis nationwide.
After ceasing operations in California on Tuesday, Cruise continued in Phoenix, Arizona, and in Austin and Houston, two of Texas’ largest cities. However, the entire robotaxi fleet nationwide has now been grounded.
In its brief thread, Cruise said that the company needed to “take steps to rebuild public trust…even if it means doing things that are uncomfortable or difficult.”
Earlier this month, at its peak, Cruise had a fleet of 400 robotaxis nationwide.
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TechTranscript
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.
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