California Investigates Safety of GM’s Self-Driving Taxis

The California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) told Cruise, a self-driving taxi company by General Motors, to take its self-driving cars off the roads right away. They said Cruise had not been truthful about how safe their technology is, and they stopped Cruise from testing their self-driving cars without drivers. Instead, they would need to use drivers if they wanted to keep developing their cars in California.

This decision came after an incident where a woman was seriously hurt. She was hit by a regular car and then run over by a Cruise self-driving taxi. After this, the government started checking if Cruise’s self-driving cars were safe for people.

Before this, there was another incident where a Cruise self-driving car and a fire truck with its siren and lights on had an accident. Because of that, the DMV asked Cruise to cut the number of self-driving cars they had on the road by 50%. Now, the new decision stops all self-driving tests for GM’s Cruise.

The DMV said that Cruise’s cars are not safe for the public, and they could be a danger.

Cruise said they were stopping their self-driving cars in San Francisco to look into the accident. They mentioned they create and use self-driving cars to save lives.

The DMV also said that Cruise did not show all the video footage of the accident at first. They also said that Cruise’s cars might not react correctly when there’s a person in the way.

Cruise also operates in some parts of Texas and Arizona.

General Motors’ CEO, Mary Barra, said earlier this year that their self-driving taxi business could make up to $50 billion every year by 2030. But with the recent problems and the fact that Cruise has been losing a lot of money, it’s unclear if this will happen. In their recent report, GM said that Cruise lost $723 million in the last quarter and has lost about $5 billion since it started in 2018.