GM's Cruise Issues Recall for 950 Autonomous Systems Over San Francisco October Accident

General Motors Co‘s GM autonomous vehicle subsidiary, Cruise, has issued a recall for a subsystem within 950 of its automated driving systems after identifying its role in a recent accident involving a Cruise AV.

What Happened: Following a collision, Cruise AVs are designed to either pull over out of traffic or stop and remain stationary as part of their post-collision response. However, In certain cases, the subsystem may cause the autonomous vehicle to pull over when ideally it should remain stationary, the company said.

Cruise provided details of an incident involving this issue that took place on Oct. 2, 2023. In this particular event, a human-driven vehicle traveling adjacent to a Cruise AV collided with a pedestrian, sending the pedestrian across the vehicle and onto the ground in the immediate path of the AV.

The AV veered to the right and braked aggressively but still made contact with the pedestrian and pulled them forward by about 20 feet. Cruise disclosed this information in a filing with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).

As for a solution, the company has deployed an over-the-air software update to all its supervised test fleet. Autonomous vehicles will also be repaired before resuming operations, the company said. 

Why It Matters: Late last month, Cruise announced that it would pause driverless operations across all its fleets.

Cruise paused its AV operations in San Francisco following a directive from the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV). California DMV suspended Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment and driverless testing permits citing ‘unreasonable risk' to public safety. The authority further alleged that the company misrepresented information on the safety of its autonomous technology.

The suspension of operations in Austin, Phoenix, and Houston followed a few days later. 

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