Embattled SF tech firm’s plan to right the ship may include layoffs

Since Kyle Vogt co-founded Cruise in 2013, he’s helmed a long run of growth — the San Francisco-based firm took on billions of dollars of investment from General Motors, began piloting hundreds of cars around American cities and scored huge wins from regulators.

In the last few weeks, much of that progress has screeched to a halt.

On Oct. 2, one of the firm’s cars ran over a pedestrian that had been knocked over by another car on a San Francisco road, and dragged the person 20 feet. Three weeks later, the California Department of Motor Vehicles accused Cruise of withholding video footage and revoked the firm’s state permits. Cruise paused its national operations two days later. Now, the firm has issued a recall of all 950 of its driverless cars, part of a multi-pronged plan to win regulators’ and the public’s trust.

Cruise retained a law firm to examine its interactions with law enforcement, regulators and the media, the firm wrote in a press release. It also announced it has hired an independent engineering firm to analyze the Oct. 2 incident and will hire a chief safety officer.

“We are committed to improving how we communicate with the public, our customers, regulators, the media, and Cruise employees,” the release says, adding that the firm is “taking a deep look at our overall safety approach.”

But that climb to good graces has seemingly been getting steeper by the day. State Senator Dave Cortese, of San Jose, told SFGATE Monday he’s considering a public push to create a state agency specifically to regulate autonomous cars, in the model of the Federal Aviation Administration. The Intercept, the New York Times and Forbes all published reports on the company this week, casting doubt on the firm’s approach to safety issues, its cars’ autonomy and morale at the company, respectively. 

The Intercept, relying on leaked safety assessment materials, reported Monday that Cruise employees raised concerns about the cars not distinguishing children from adults and about a lack of “data around kid-centric scenarios.” A Cruise car, in a simulation, detected a toddler-sized dummy but still hit it with its side mirror at 28 miles an hour, the report said. Company spokesperson Navideh Forghani told SFGATE Wednesday that the simulation was proactive and represents a very unlikely scenario, but admitted that Cruise vehicles categorize walking children simply as “pedestrians.” She added that pedestrians get the cars’ “highest safety priority.”

Cruise has known for over a year that its cars are bad at spotting large holes and unmarked construction pits, the report continued. When the firm identified this concern, Forghani said, Cruise started avoiding construction zones with holes and programmed its cars to trigger remote assistance faster when they detected construction hazards. She added that the firm is working to update its cars’ software to detect unbarricaded pits as well as humans do.

The firm’s vehicles receive remote assistance from human workers within every 5 miles of driving in San Francisco, the NYT reported Friday — Forghani told SFGATE Wednesday that the cars usually resolve the sessions without the need for human action, but conceded that driverless cars are generally in a remote assistance session from 2% to 4% of the time.

Cruise and parent company General Motors also plan to pause production of the firm’s steering wheel-less van, the Origin, according to a Monday report from Forbes. That outlet also reported, Wednesday, that firm leadership acknowledged a “trust deficit with most people” in a recent meeting. Forbes quoted an anonymous employee who compared the company to the sinking Titanic.

The various revelations — like the Nov. 2 recall of its 950-vehicle fleet over their “post-collision” responses — paint a different image of the driverless car technology, and the company behind it, than what Cruise sold to San Franciscans earlier this year. Up against a chorus of doubt from public officials and first responders, the firm lauded its tech as far safer than human drivers. Vogt, in a September interview with the Washington Post, called the public scrutiny a “double standard” and said, “anything that we do differently than humans is being sensationalized.” He said he was optimistic about a future where driverless cars would be the default mode of transportation in the city.

Now, the firm’s driverless testing is on an indefinite pause, and the company has declined to provide a timeline for reapplying to the DMV permits. Vogt, according to Forbes and the NYT, told his employees on Oct. 30 that some of them will soon lose their jobs.

Work at Cruise or another Bay Area tech company? Contact tech reporter Stephen Council securely at [email protected] or on Signal at 628-204-5452.