Ex-SF mayor is now a paid Cruise advisor, and he’s staying quiet

Brown vociferously defended driverless cars just a few months ago, and once appeared in an ad for Cruise, but he doesn’t want to weigh in on the company suspending their nationwide fleet this week amid widespread scrutiny. Reached Friday through a spokesperson, Brown declined to answer a series of questions submitted by SFGATE.

In August, Brown took issue with local transit officials, who were calling for more data and a slower rollout by driverless car companies. 

“Every day in the city residents are using autonomous vehicles to get to work, get home from the bar, get a meal delivered from the food bank — and doing it safely,” Brown wrote in a statement, as POLITICO’s Lara Korte first reported on social media. “As our city’s transit system faces steep challenges, it is deeply disappointing to see SFMTA direct considerable time and resources to hamstring an industry with a strong safety record rather than focus on improving the services they’re in charge of.”

Brown’s statement came just a few days before a key vote to allow the expansion of Waymo and Cruise services in San Francisco. SFGATE found at the time that Brown had been a paid adviser for Cruise since 2020; the resolution went through, and the company got what it wanted — more cars in the streets and more hours of paid ride-hailing. 

This week, the California Department of Motor Vehicles put Cruise’s operations to a stop. The department suspended Cruise’s permits for driverless rides on Tuesday, citing a San Francisco incident in which a Cruise car ran over and dragged a woman who was first hit and knocked over by another car. The department also alleged that Cruise temporarily hid some of the video footage of the incident. 

On Thursday, Cruise announced on social media that it would be temporarily pausing its entire nationwide fleet “to examine our processes, systems, and tools and reflect on how we can better operate in a way that will earn public trust.” It’s a sudden turnaround, just as the company was beginning a rollout in Los Angeles and testing the cars in other warm-weather cities like Dallas and Miami. And Brown, one of the company’s most prominent spokespeople, appears to be disinclined to say anything about the service he lauded as having a “strong safety record.”

Hear of anything happening at Cruise or another tech company? Contact tech reporter Stephen Council securely at [email protected] or on Signal at 628-204-5452.