Four views into the Cruise Robotaxi Pedestrian Dragging Mishap
On October 2, 2023, a Cruise robotaxi dragged a woman 20 feet underneath the vehicle in San Francisco. The circumstances of the mishap and everything else are complex. But the robotaxi industry was profoundly shaken.
Here are four descriptions of the events and what might be learned from those events. Each is in a different style, intended for a different audience.
J. Mathews, “In a single night, self-driving startup Cruise went from sizzling startup to cautionary tale. Here’s what really happened—and how GM is scrambling to save its $10B bet,” Fortune, May 16, 2024.Mainstream business audience.Long-form journalism style, includes interview material from former Cruise staff and contractors not available in the external investigation report.P. Koopman, “Lessons from the Cruise Robotaxi Pedestrian Dragging Mishap,” IEEE Reliability Magazine, in press for 2024.General engineering audience; a less dense, more descriptive style than the SafeComp paper below.Peer reviewed technical magazine style, emphasizing lessons that might be learned.P. Koopman, “Anatomy of a Robotaxi Crash: Lessons from the Cruise Pedestrian Dragging Mishap,” SafeComp 2024 proceedings, preprint April 29, 2024Detailed technical summary of the material in the Quinn Emanuel external investigation report. Peer reviewed academic paper. Condensed style with detailed citations to the external investigation report.Best guide to rigorously putting all the disjoint pieces of the external investigation report into a more coherent narrative.Quin Emanuel Trial Lawyers, REPORT TO THE BOARDS OF DIRECTORS OF CRUISE LLC, GM CRUISE HOLDINGS LLC, AND GENERAL MOTORS HOLDINGS LLC REGARDING THE OCTOBER 2, 2023 ACCIDENT IN SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 24, 2024.External investigation paid for by Cruise, so expect this to present the facts in the best possible light for Cruise as a business.The authoritative source to publicly available information. Some pages are heavily redacted.Cruise also maintains a safety page. A the time of this writing the big fonts are used to say “transparent about safety” and “continuous improvement”. So far not a lot of detail about what has changed and what transparency will mean as they get back on the road.
