NHTSA opens probe into GM’s

self-driving ‘cruise’ unit following

major accidents

Fri, December 16, 2022 

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has opened a probe into GM's self-driving "cruise autonomous driving" unit after multiple reports of the vehicles crashing on the road.

Video Transcript

DAVE BRIGGS: The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has opened a probe into GM's Cruise autonomous driving unit after a number of reports the vehicle's crashing on the road. Yahoo Finance senior autos reporter Pras Subramanian here with more on this story. What's going on?

PRAS SUBRAMANIAN: It's kind of another black eye for the self-driving industry here. You know, Cruise, GM's big autonomous division out in San Francisco, apparently a couple of crashes here with cars that were inappropriately hard braking or becoming immobilized while operating. So basically the car, like right here in motion, it comes across a hazard, and it stops and panics. And what happens is it becomes an object in traffic that's stuck there. And people have to get out in the middle of traffic, so it's problematic.

So apparently, there's three accidents, three hard braking accidents with this, and a number of other incidents that we don't know about. GM says-- their crew says they're complying with the investigation and that they've done 700,000 autonomous miles with the system. So it's still happening. They want to try to expand their-- probably right now, they're in 30% of SF. They want to expand to 100%. So not exactly easy when you've got kind of some issues in a probe going into it.

But I will say this, though. This comes after Ford pulled the plug on Argo AI, their autonomous division. And then also we have Tesla still under investigation with NHTSA because of these crashes at accident scenes. So it's still-- this technology is still very nascent.

DAVE BRIGGS: Years and years away, isn't it?

JARED BLIKRE: I guess I can sleep well at night knowing that the default action, if we have an AI algorithm controlling a car, rolling down the streets of San Francisco or whatever it is, it goes into panic mode, and it just sits there.

PRAS SUBRAMANIAN: It stops, yeah.

JARED BLIKRE: It just stops.