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Self-driving startup cruise raises $2.75 billion from walmart, others.

By Hyunjoo Jin

San Francisco (Reuters) - Self-drive automaker Cruise, backed by General Motors Co, on Thursday said it raised $2.75 billion in its latest funding round with additional investment from Walmart Inc and others, taking the startup's valuation over $30 billion.

The announcement comes a week after peer TuSimple revealed plans for an initial public offering (IPO), at a time when self-drive technology is yet to be commercialised.

"We are focused on our path to commercialization right now but the IPOs happening in the space right now are a great indication of the strength of the industry and the opportunity self-driving presents," a Cruise spokeswoman said in a statement to Reuters.

In January, the San Francisco-based startup said Microsoft Corp would join General Motors, Japan's Honda Motor Co Ltd and institutional investors for a combined new equity investment of over $2 billion.

On Monday, Cruise said it planned to begin deploying a limited number of its Origin vehicles for ride-hail services in Dubai from 2023, its first overseas commercial service.

"Cruise is executing a global strategy with the right partners," said Grayson Brulte, president at consultancy Brulte & Co. "At the end of the day it will come down to who can cut the best deals which long-term generate revenue and profits."

Cruise's relationship with Walmart includes a trial delivery service in Scottsdale, Arizona, announced in November.

(Reporting by Hyunjoo Jin; Editing by Christopher Cushing)

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Cruise resumes manual driving as next step in return to driverless mission

Cruise was founded in 2013 with a clear and focused mission: to make transportation safer and more accessible. In the ten years that followed, we’ve worked hard to build advanced self-driving technology and provided hundreds of thousands of driverless trips to riders on complex city streets in San Francisco, Phoenix, Austin, Houston and elsewhere.   

In October 2023, we paused operations of our fleet to focus on rebuilding trust with regulators and the communities we serve, and to redesign our approach to safety. We’ve made significant progress, guided by new company leadership, recommendations from third-party experts, and a focus on a close partnership with the communities in which our vehicles operate. We are committed to this improvement as a continuous effort.

Looking to the next chapter, our goal is to resume driverless operations. As we continue working to rebuild trust and determine the city where we will scale driverless, we also remain focused on continuing to improve our performance and overall safety approach. To that end, Cruise is resuming manual driving to create maps and gather road information in select cities, starting in Phoenix. This work is done using human-driven vehicles without autonomous systems engaged, and is a critical step for validating our self-driving systems as we work towards returning to our driverless mission. This will help inform where we ultimately will resume driverless operations.

Cruise has a strong history in Phoenix and it is home to a large number of Cruise employees. It’s a city that supports AV and transportation innovation, and Phoenix leaders strive to ensure the metro area is an incubator for advanced technology. We plan to expand this effort to other select cities as we continue to engage with officials and community leaders. 

Adaptive Fleet Learning 

Cruise’s AV stack is based on AI technology that learns from information gathered through our driving experience and retrains and evolves our models continuously. The fleet learns from every intersection, construction zone, and road sign it encounters, and applies that knowledge to other environments and scenarios – much the same as a human driver learns, but with far more data and the ability to impart that continuous learning across the entire fleet. 

During our operational pause over the last few months, Cruise maintained ongoing and extensive testing in complex, dynamic simulated environments and on closed courses, enabling continuous retraining and improvement. Now, we are building on that work to create high-quality semantic maps and gather road information to ensure future operations meet elevated safety and performance targets. And because no two cities are the same, we plan to conduct this manual and supervised driving in multiple cities - starting with Phoenix - to expose our AVs to a diverse set of driving environments and conditions as we prepare for future driverless service. 

Steps Prior to Driverless Operations 

The first step is identifying high fidelity location data for road features and map information like speed limits, stop signs, traffic lights, lane paint, right turn only lanes and more. Having current and accurate information will help an autonomous vehicle understand where it is and the location of certain road features. We also measure our perception and prediction systems against our elevated performance criteria, using trained safety drivers as a benchmark. At this stage, no autonomous systems are engaged and the vehicles will not carry public passengers.

Next, we’ll validate our AV’s end-to-end performance against our rigorous safety and AV performance requirements through supervised autonomous driving on public roads, in addition to the ongoing simulation and closed course driving we do. During this phase, the Cruise vehicles will drive themselves and a safety driver is present behind the wheel to monitor and take over if needed. 

Safety is the defining principle for everything we do and will guide our progress through this process. As we begin this work, we have requirements in place that not only cover the safety criteria, functions and roadworthiness of the vehicle, but also include robust incident response protocols and extensive training and ongoing performance monitoring for the operators behind the wheel.

Commitments to Safety and Our Communities

Over the past several weeks we have communicated directly with officials, first responders, and community leaders in cities we’ve previously operated in to share updates on our path forward. We are committed to safely deploying our technology in close collaboration with officials and communities at every step.  

Our goal is to earn trust and build partnerships with the communities such that, ultimately, we resume fully driverless operations in collaboration with a city. 

As part of our commitment to improve our operations Cruise has implemented the following measures:

Established new leadership, and engaged more closely with experienced advisors from GM to support safety, legal, regulatory, and communications functions.

Hired an experienced chief safety officer to guide improved safety processes and procedures throughout the organization.

Established a cross-disciplinary regulatory team to guide engagement with regulators in regard to incident reporting.

Reviewed and strengthened key internal safety governance processes to incorporate more robust cross-functional review and leadership accountability.

Work is also underway to establish important systems and processes for ensuring safe operations across the company including:

Reforming and updating incident response and crisis management protocols to ensure more consistent, effective and transparent response.

Renewing internal training and reinforcing safety culture systems.

Reevaluating and reestablishing our safety target for supervised and driverless operations.

Reengaging with first responders to facilitate ongoing trainings for each precinct and fire house in the areas we intend to operate in. 

Looking Ahead

We believe AVs will save lives and significantly reduce the number and severity of accidents on America’s and Arizona’s roads every year. AVs will also improve lives - including creating  convenient and safe transportation options for the elderly and those with disabilities. As we begin this journey, we look forward to partnering with local communities to jointly achieve our shared mission of making transportation safer for all.

GM’s Cruise robotaxis are back in Phoenix — but people are driving them

General Motors’ Cruise is redeploying robotaxis in Phoenix after nearly five months of paused operations, the company said in a blog post. The catch? The cars will be in “manual mode,” so they won’t be driving themselves.

Cruise will resume manual driving of its autonomous vehicles to create maps and gather road information in certain cities, starting with Phoenix, the company said Tuesday. The GM subsidiary already had a presence in Phoenix before it pulled its entire U.S.-based fleet last year following an incident in San Francisco that left a pedestrian stuck under and dragged by a Cruise robotaxi.

Prior to that incident, Cruise had been announcing launches in new cities — including Dallas, Houston and Miami — at a startling pace. Critics accused the company of expanding too fast and cutting corners on safety.

Today, we’re taking an important next step in returning to our mission: we're reintroducing a small fleet of human-driven vehicles in select cities – starting in Phoenix. These vehicles will create maps and gather road information, a critical step for validating future… — cruise (@Cruise) April 9, 2024

Now Cruise appears to be going back to basics, a sharp pivot away from the aggressive growth strategy the company has been pursuing for the last few years. In 2022, former Cruise CEO and co-founder Kyle Vogt — who stepped down amid last year’s controversy — told investors that Cruise had “ de-risked the technical approach ” by applying what worked well in San Francisco to similar ride-share markets. 

In a blog post published Tuesday that reads like it could have been written in 2018, Cruise explains how it needs to first identify high-fidelity location data for road features and map information like speed limits and lane paint so that the AV can understand where it is in relation to its environment. The post then goes on to chart out how Cruise will eventually make it back to fully autonomous operations: slowly, supervised by humans, and with continuous validation of the technology. 

All of these steps are part and parcel of building and expanding a self-driving car business, which leaves us wondering if Cruise is spelling out the obvious for the public’s benefit, or if its new safety team is scrapping its old technology and starting over? 

A Cruise spokesperson declined to comment on the company’s strategy. 

The October incident wasn’t the first time Cruise’s technology has caused problems. Even as Cruise expanded to new cities in the second half of 2023, its robotaxis were routinely malfunctioning in cities like San Francisco and Austin, disrupting the flow of traffic, public transit and first responders. 

Technological issues aside, what really put Cruise in hot water late last year was its response to the incident. Regulators accused the company of withholding information about the crash, only sharing that a Cruise robotaxi ran over a pedestrian who had been flung into its path after first being struck by a human-driven vehicle. A n internal report conducted by law firm Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan and released in January confirmed that Cruise employees weren’t forthcoming with what happened after the Cruise vehicle ran over the pedestrian, only sharing days later that the robotaxi’s pullover maneuver resulted in the pedestrian being dragged for 20 feet. 

The mishandling of the information resulted in parent company GM slashing spending and taking greater control of Cruise . 

A big part of Cruise’s strategy moving forward, as outlined in Tuesday’s blog post, involves reforming and establishing updated incident response and crisis management protocols to ensure more efficient and transparent responses in the future. The company says it will also work on improved engagement with first responders to facilitate trainings in each precinct it plans to operate in. 

Cruise has not announced when or where it will resume driverless operations. The company’s main operations were historically based in San Francisco, but Cruise lost its permits to operate there following the accident. Cruise began expanding its paid service area in the Phoenix area in August 2023 . Alphabet’s Waymo — Cruise’s main competitor that’s still active in San Francisco — has operated a paid, driverless robotaxi service in the area since 2020 and last year doubled its service area in downtown Phoenix and launched driverless rides to the airport.

GM's robotaxi unit Cruise to resume operations with small human-driven fleet in Arizona

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Reporting by Akash Sriram in Bengaluru and Joe White in Detroit; Editing by Shilpi Majumdar

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Cruise acquires Voyage in another autonomous vehicle merger

Dense, urban testing meets low-speed retirement community testing.

By Andrew J. Hawkins , transportation editor with 10+ years of experience who covers EVs, public transportation, and aviation. His work has appeared in The New York Daily News and City & State.

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Cruise, a majority-owned subsidiary of General Motors, will acquire self-driving startup Voyage in another major autonomous vehicle merger. The announcement came less than a week after news first surfaced that the two companies were in talks about an acquisition. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Cruise mainly operates its autonomous vehicles in dense, urban settings like downtown San Francisco, while Voyage oversees a fleet of low-speed autonomous vehicles providing trips to residents of several retirement communities . Both companies have tested their vehicles without a safety driver behind the wheel and aspire to launch full-fledged commercial robot taxi services.

“The self-driving industry is consolidating”

“The self-driving industry is consolidating, and the leaders of a trillion-dollar market are fast emerging,” Voyage CEO Oliver Cameron said in a statement . “After being intimately involved with the AV industry for the last five years, I can say with certainty that Cruise — with its advanced self-driving technology, unique auto-maker partnerships, and all-electric purpose-built vehicle with no human controls — is poised to be  the  clear leader.”

Voyage is a spinoff from Udacity, an online learning service that offers courses in driverless technology. Cameron headed the startup’s open-source self-driving project before launching his own venture. Sebastian Thrun, Udacity’s chairman and one of the founders of Google’s self-driving car project, was briefly chairman of Voyage before a conflict forced him to step down. The company operates a fleet of self-driving cars in two retirement communities, one near San Jose, California, and the other north of Orlando, Florida, both called The Villages. But Voyage doesn’t want to be seen as the exclusive AV service for senior citizens.

“I think sometimes people think Voyage is all about just low speed, zero to 25 mile-an-hour autonomy,” Cameron said in an interview with  The Verge in 2019 . “We’re not. We’re going to expand our capabilities over time, to zero to 35 [mph], to zero to 55 [mph], to zero to 65 [mph]. And one day we’ll connect all the roadways in the US with a Level 4 self-driving car. But we’re not going to say that’ll be delivered next year. And we’re not going to wait to build a business before that’s ready.”

“I think sometimes people think Voyage is all about just low speed, zero to 25 mile-an-hour autonomy”

Cruise is certainly one of the best capitalized autonomous vehicle companies in the world. In 2018, it secured both a  $2.25 billion investment from the SoftBank  Vision Fund and a $2 billion investment from Honda. In 2019,  Cruise landed a $1.15 billion investment  from GM, SoftBank, Honda, and T. Rowe Price Group, which put the company’s valuation at $19 billion.

There have been a rash of mergers in the world of autonomous vehicles over the past few years: Amazon acquired Zoox ; Aurora absorbed Uber’s autonomous vehicle division ; Apple bought distressed startup Drive.ai and was (at one point) considering a tie-up with Hyundai; Intel bought Mobileye ; and Delphi acquired nuTonomy and became Aptiv, which then joined with Hyundai to become Motional . The AV industry has gotten smaller as target dates for mass adoption of autonomous vehicles gets further away.

Cruise recently began testing its fully driverless vehicles in San Francisco for the first time, but the company still doesn’t allow non-employees to ride in its vehicles. Cruise had planned to launch a commercial taxi service in 2019  but failed to do so , and it has yet to publicly commit to a new date.

Last year,  Cruise unveiled the Cruise Origin , a fully driverless prototype vehicle without a steering wheel, pedals, or any controls typically associated with human driving. The vehicle, which will go into production at  GM’s Detroit-Hamtramck plant , is built to be shared by multiple passengers — though it remains to be seen how much appetite there is for shared vehicles in a post-COVID world. Cruise recently unveiled a new set of safety protocols intended to keep people socially distant during trips and the vehicle sanitized between fares.

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G.M.’s Cruise Moved Fast in the Driverless Race. It Got Ugly.

Cruise has hired a law firm to investigate how it responded to regulators, as its cars sit idle and questions grow about its C.E.O.’s expansion plans.

By Tripp Mickle ,  Cade Metz and Yiwen Lu

Tripp Mickle, Cade Metz and Yiwen Lu have been reporting throughout the year on the rollout of robot taxis in San Francisco.

Two months ago, Kyle Vogt, the chief executive of Cruise, choked up as he recounted how a driver had killed a 4-year-old girl in a stroller at a San Francisco intersection. “It barely made the news,” he said, pausing to collect himself. “Sorry. I get emotional.”

To make streets safer, he said in an interview, cities should embrace self-driving cars like those designed by Cruise, a subsidiary of General Motors. They do not get distracted, drowsy or drunk, he said, and being programmed to put safety first meant they could substantially reduce car-related fatalities.

Now Mr. Vogt’s driverless car company faces its own safety concerns as he contends with angry regulators, anxious employees, and skepticism about his management and the viability of a business that he has often said will save lives while generating billions of dollars.

On Oct. 2, a car hit a woman in a San Francisco intersection and flung her into the path of one of Cruise’s driverless taxis . The Cruise car ran over her, briefly stopped and then dragged her some 20 feet before pulling to the curb, causing severe injuries.

California’s Department of Motor Vehicles last week accused Cruise of omitting the dragging of the woman from a video of the incident it initially provided to the agency. The D.M.V. said the company had “misrepresented” its technology and told Cruise to shut down its driverless car operations in the state.

Two days later, Cruise went further and voluntarily suspended all of its driverless operations around the country, taking 400 or so driverless cars off the road. Since then, Cruise’s board has hired the law firm Quinn Emanuel to investigate the company’s response to the incident, including its interactions with regulators, law enforcement and the media.

The board plans to evaluate the findings and any recommended changes. Exponent, a consulting firm that evaluates complex software systems, is conducting a separate review of the crash, said two people who attended a companywide meeting at Cruise on Monday.

Cruise employees worry that there is no easy way to fix the company’s problems, said five former and current employees and business partners, while its rivals fear Cruise’s issues could lead to tougher driverless car rules for all of them.

Company insiders are putting the blame for what went wrong on a tech industry culture — led by the 38-year-old Mr. Vogt — that put a priority on the speed of the program over safety. In the competition between Cruise and its top driverless car rival, Waymo, Mr. Vogt wanted to dominate in the same way Uber dominated its smaller ride-hailing competitor, Lyft.

“Kyle is a guy who is willing to take risks, and he is willing to move quickly. He is very Silicon Valley,” said Matthew Wansley, a professor at the Cardozo School of Law in New York who specializes in emerging automotive technologies. “That both explains the success of Cruise and its mistakes.”

When Mr. Vogt spoke to the company about its suspended operations on Monday, he said that he did not know when they could start again and that layoffs could be coming, according to two employees who attended the companywide meeting.

He acknowledged that Cruise had lost the public’s trust, the employees said, and outlined a plan to win it back by being more transparent and putting more emphasis on safety. He named Louise Zhang, vice president of safety, as the company’s interim chief safety officer and said she would report directly to him.

“Trust is one of those things that takes a long time to build and just seconds to lose,” Mr. Vogt said, according to attendees. “We need to get to the bottom of this and start rebuilding that trust.”

Cruise declined to make Mr. Vogt available for an interview. G.M. said in a statement that its “commitment to Cruise with the goal of commercialization remains steadfast.” It said it believed in the company’s mission and technology and supported its steps to put safety first.

Mr. Vogt began working on self-driving cars as a teenager. When he was 13, he programmed a Power Wheels ride-on toy car to follow the yellow line in a parking lot. He later participated in a government-sponsored self-driving car competition while studying at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In 2013, he started Cruise Automation. The company retrofitted conventional cars with sensors and computers to operate autonomously on highways. He sold the business three years later to G.M. for $1 billion .

After the deal closed, Dan Ammann, G.M.’s president, took over as Cruise’s chief executive, and Mr. Vogt became its president and chief technology officer.

As president, Mr. Vogt built out Cruise’s engineering team while the company expanded to about 2,000 employees from 40, former employees said. He championed bringing cars to as many markets as fast as possible, believing that the speedier the company moved, the more lives it would save, former employees said.

In 2021, Mr. Vogt took over as chief executive. Mary T. Barra, G.M.’s chief executive, began including Mr. Vogt on earnings calls and presentations, where he hyped the self-driving market and predicted that Cruise would have one million cars by 2030.

Mr. Vogt pressed his company to continue its aggressive expansion, learning from problems its cars ran into while driving in San Francisco. The company charged an average of $10.50 per ride in the city.

After a Cruise vehicle collided with a Toyota Prius driving in a bus lane last summer, some people at the company proposed having its vehicles temporarily avoid streets with bus lanes, former employees said. But Mr. Vogt vetoed that idea, saying Cruise’s vehicles needed to continue to drive those streets to master their complexity. The company later changed its software to reduce the risk of similar accidents.

In August, a Cruise driverless car collided with a San Francisco fire truck that was responding to an emergency. The company later changed the way its cars detect sirens .

But after the crash, city officials and activists pressured the state to slow Cruise’s expansion. They also called on Cruise to provide more data about collisions, including documentation of unplanned stops, traffic violations and vehicle performance, said Aaron Peskin, president of San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors.

“Cruise’s corporate behavior over time has increasingly led to a lack of trust,” Mr. Peskin said.

With its business frozen, there are concerns that Cruise is becoming too much of a financial burden on G.M. and is hurting the auto giant’s reputation. Ms. Barra told investors that Cruise had “tremendous opportunity to grow” just hours before California’s D.MV. told Cruise to shut down its driverless operations.

Cruise has not collected fares or ferried riders in more than a week. In San Francisco, Phoenix, Dallas, Houston, Miami, and Austin, Texas, hundreds of Cruise’s white and orange Chevrolet Bolts sit stagnant. The shutdown complicates Cruise’s ambition of hitting its goal of $1 billion of revenue in 2025.

G.M. has spent an average of $588 million a quarter on Cruise over the past year, a 42 percent increase from a year ago. Each Chevrolet Bolt that Cruise operates costs $150,000 to $200,000, according to a person familiar with its operations.

Half of Cruise’s 400 cars were in San Francisco when the driverless operations were stopped. Those vehicles were supported by a vast operations staff, with 1.5 workers per vehicle. The workers intervened to assist the company’s vehicles every 2.5 to five miles, according to two people familiar with is operations. In other words, they frequently had to do something to remotely control a car after receiving a cellular signal that it was having problems.

To cover its spiraling costs, G.M. will need to inject or raise more funds for the business, said Chris McNally, a financial analyst at Evercore ISI. During a call with analysts in late October, Ms. Barra said G.M. would share its funding plans before the end of the year.

Tripp Mickle reports on Apple and Silicon Valley for The Times and is based in San Francisco. His focus on Apple includes product launches, manufacturing issues and political challenges. He also writes about trends across the tech industry, including layoffs, generative A.I. and robot taxis.  More about Tripp Mickle

Cade Metz is a technology reporter and the author of “Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought A.I. to Google, Facebook, and The World.” He covers artificial intelligence, driverless cars, robotics, virtual reality and other emerging areas. More about Cade Metz

Yiwen Lu reports on technology for The New York Times. More about Yiwen Lu

Driverless Cars and the Future of Transportation

Autonomous taxis have arrived in car-obsessed Los Angeles, the nation’s second most populous city. But some Angelenos aren’t ready to go driverless .

Cruise, the embattled self-driving car subsidiary of General Motors,  said that it would eliminate roughly a quarter of its work force , as the company looked to rein in costs after an incident led California regulators to shut down its robot taxi operations.

Tesla, the world’s dominant maker of electric vehicles, recalled more than two million vehicles  to address concerns from U.S. officials about Autopilot , the company’s self-driving software.

An Appetite for Destruction: A wave of lawsuits argue that Tesla’s Autopilot software is dangerously overhyped. What can its blind spots teach us about Elon Musk, the company’s erratic chief executive ?

Along for the Ride: Here’s what New York Times reporters experienced during test rides in driverless cars operated by Tesla , Waymo  and Cruise .

The Future of Transportation?: Driverless cars, once a Silicon Valley fantasy, have become a 24-hour-a-day reality in San Francisco . “The Daily” looked at the unique challenges of coexisting with cars that drive themselves .

Stressing Cities: In San Francisco and Austin, Texas, where passengers can hail autonomous taxis, the vehicles are starting to take a toll on city services , even slowing down emergency response times.

A Fast Rise and Fall: Cruise, a subsidiary of General Motors, wanted to grow fast. Now, the company faces safety concerns  as it contends with angry regulators, anxious employees and skepticism about the viability of the business .

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GM’s self-driving car company Cruise lost $3.48 billion in 2023

General motors, which owns cruise, said it will reduce the company’s expenses by about $1 billion to ‘slow the cash burn’.

SAN FRANCISCO — General Motors-owned self-driving car company Cruise’s operating loss totaled $3.48 billion in 2023, a staggering deficit that comes as the company faces two federal probes over an October crash in San Francisco and uncertainty over when it will resume its driverless testing program around the country.

Cruise, once regarded as a front-runner in the autonomous-car industry, has been bleeding money since General Motors acquired it in 2016. While General Motors said Tuesday that it “remains committed” to Cruise, the automotive giant also said it will reduce Cruise’s expenses by about $1 billion to “slow the cash burn and align with a narrower focus in 2024.”

Cruise, which lost $3.2 billion in 2022, according to financial statements, halted its driverless testing program around the country after a crash in the fall in which one of its cars hit and dragged a pedestrian about 20 feet at 7 mph.

“At Cruise, we are committed to earning back the trust of regulators and the public through our commitments and our actions,” General Motors CEO Mary Barra said in a call with investors Tuesday. Barra added that GM plans to “refocus and relaunch” the embattled self-driving car company this year and that the company plans to cooperate with two ongoing federal investigations by the Justice Department and Securities and Exchange Commission that were disclosed last week .

General Motors had a strong 2023 overall, with revenue of $171.8 billion. Still, the autonomous-car company’s financial woes come as investors pour billions of dollars into the wider self-driving car industry, with hopes that robot-driven cars will usher in a future with fewer road injuries and fatalities. But even as the technology rapidly improves, the sector has been beset by recalls , financial issues and accidents that often gain far more attention than if they involved human drivers.

Google, which owns Waymo — Cruise’s main competitor — doesn’t disclose how much money the self-driving car unit burns each year, but it’s probably in the billions as well. The company’s “other bets” division, of which Waymo is one of the main expenses, lost $4.1 billion in 2023, according to the company’s financial statements.

Both Cruise and Waymo hit a major milestone this summer when California regulators allowed the companies to offer 24/7 robotaxi service in San Francisco. But the California Department of Motor Vehicles suspended Cruise’s permits just a few months later, after the Oct. 2 crash in which a human-driven car hit a jaywalking pedestrian and flung her in the path of a Cruise driverless car.

In footage initially shared by Cruise with The Washington Post, other media outlets and the California Department of Motor Vehicles, the robot car appeared to stop as soon as it made contact with the pedestrian. But it has since been revealed — by state regulators and in a third-party report dissecting the crash — that the car continued to drag the woman.

According to the report, which runs more than 100 pages, a human driver would probably “not have been able to avoid the collision under similar circumstances.” But, the report said, an “alert and attentive human driver would be aware that an impact of some sort had occurred and would not have continued driving without further investigating the situation.”

Cruise, which did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday, has had a tumultuous few months since the crash, including layoffs and the resignation of its CEO late last year.

Gerrit De Vynck contributed to this report.

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GM's driverless car company Cruise is under investigation by several agencies

Camila Domonoske

Cruise autonomous vehicles sit parked in a lot in June 2023 in San Francisco, Calif. The company's fleet of robotaxis have not been operating for the past few months, after the company's response to a crash in October raised concerns with regulators. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images hide caption

Cruise autonomous vehicles sit parked in a lot in June 2023 in San Francisco, Calif. The company's fleet of robotaxis have not been operating for the past few months, after the company's response to a crash in October raised concerns with regulators.

The GM-owned driverless car company Cruise is under investigation by several federal agencies for an October crash that seriously injured a pedestrian.

The company on Thursday said it is being investigated by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the U.S. Department of Justice, and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, in addition to California agencies. Cruise said it is "fully cooperating" with the regulatory and enforcement agencies that have opened the investigations.

In the Oct. 2 crash, a vehicle struck a pedestrian and sent her flying into the path of the self-driving Cruise car. The Cruise vehicle then dragged the pedestrian for another 20 feet, causing serious injuries.

Cruise, which owns a fleet of robotaxis in San Francisco, then failed to adequately inform regulators of the self-driving vehicle's full role in the incident. Since then, Cruise's driverless ride-hailing services have been paused in all markets. The CEO resigned, along with other senior executives.

Armed with traffic cones, protesters are immobilizing driverless cars

Cruise also hired outside law firm Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan to investigate the incident.

In a scathing report, released Thursday, the law firm said Cruise's interactions with regulators revealed "a fundamental misapprehension" of the company's obligations to the public.

The company says it accepts the law firm's conclusions and is focused on "earning back public trust."

Driverless car startup Cruise's no good, terrible year

"poor leadership" cited as one reason for the cruise's failing.

In its initial explanations of the crash to the public and to regulators, Cruise did not acknowledge that the robotaxi dragged the pedestrian. Instead, it focused on the fact that the collision was originally caused by another vehicle.

The law firm did not conclude that Cruise intentionally misled regulators. The report states that Cruise did attempt to play a full video for regulators that showed the pedestrian being dragged, but "internet connectivity issues" repeatedly caused the video to freeze. And instead of pointing out the video's significance, "Cruise employees remained silent, failing to ensure that the regulators understood what they likely could not see."

California orders Cruise driverless cars off the roads because of safety concerns

Letting a video "speak for itself" when the video couldn't even play didn't quite rise to the level of concealing the truth, the law firm concluded. But the report said it revealed a lot about Cruise's corporate culture.

"The reasons for Cruise's failings in this instance are numerous: poor leadership, mistakes in judgment, lack of coordination, an 'us versus them' mentality with regulators, and a fundamental misapprehension of Cruise's obligations of accountability and transparency to the government and the public," the law firm wrote.

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Waymo will launch paid robotaxi service in Los Angeles on Wednesday

Tech startup Waymo said Tuesday that it would begin offering paid robotaxi rides in Los Angeles beginning Wednesday, as the nation’s experiment with self-driving car technology picks up steam. 

Waymo, a spinoff of Google, had announced details for its service in Los Angeles in January as it sought state regulatory approval and local support. Within the last year, Waymo has offered free "tour" rides in Los Angeles, and last month, it received regulatory approval to expand to a paid service, despite pushback from the Teamsters union and the Los Angeles Department of Transportation. Waymo previewed the project in a blog post in 2022.

Waymo said Tuesday that more than 50,000 people were on its waitlist to use the service. The company did not say how many users it would allow to fully use the app starting Wednesday. Last month, the company said it was starting with a Los Angeles fleet of fewer than 50 cars covering a 63-square-mile area from Santa Monica to downtown L.A. Los Angeles County has a population of 9.7 million people. 

The service works similarly to other ride-hailing smartphone apps such as Flywheel, Lyft and Uber, except that Waymo’s vehicles have no human drivers present. Riders follow instructions on the app and through the vehicle’s sound system, though Waymo workers can assist remotely. 

Robotaxis are getting more buzz as the technology advances in fits and starts. Tesla CEO Elon Musk said Friday that Tesla would reveal a robotaxi product in August, though he gave no details. Cruise, a General Motors subsidiary that paused its robotaxi service last year after one of its vehicles failed to detect a pedestrian underneath it, said Tuesday that it would reintroduce human-driven vehicles in select cities, including Phoenix, as a step back toward driverless operations. 

Various China-based tech startups are also testing self-driving cars on California roads, drawing scrutiny from lawmakers. 

But for now, Waymo’s only competition is traditional, human-driven car services. 

Waymo’s expansion to Los Angeles will bring autonomous for-profit taxis to the nation’s second-largest city — and to a city long synonymous with car travel. Waymo already operates commercial robotaxi services in San Francisco and Phoenix. 

Chris Ludwick, Waymo’s product management director, called the Los Angeles move a milestone. 

“The reception from Angelenos so far has been exceptional, and we look forward to welcoming more riders into our service over time,” he said in a statement. 

Waymo said it informed its test riders about the change Monday in an email, which someone also posted to Reddit. 

Robotaxis have faced criticism on multiple fronts, from the threat they pose to drivers’ jobs to the mistakes they’ve made blocking city buses or emergency vehicles. Under California law, driverless cars can’t be given traffic tickets, and they could make traffic congestion worse . 

The Los Angeles Department of Transportation said the Waymo expansion was happening too soon, without enough local oversight of autonomous vehicle operations, but in an order last month state officials said that those concerns were unfounded. 

Supporters of robotaxis have countered that human drivers have a terrible safety record , with traffic deaths topping 40,000 a year in the U.S. Waymo has not reported a death or serious injury from its technology, and Waymo vehicles appear to be generally more observant of traffic laws than human drivers are, according to journalists who have ridden in them. 

In San Francisco, the futuristic nature of driverless vehicles has become a tourist attraction. 

Opponents of autonomous taxi expansions, including the Teamsters, have vowed to slow down the growth of companies such as Waymo. A bill pending in the California Senate would give cities and counties authority over robotaxi services — a power that currently resides with state government agencies. A hearing on that bill is scheduled for next week. 

David Ingram covers tech for NBC News.

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Driver in fatal Texas crash was using Ford’s auto driving system, officials say

Investigators say data from electric Mustang Mach E shows ‘Blue Cruise’ was in use when SUV struck a stopped car in San Antonio

The driver of a Ford electric SUV involved in a February fatal crash in Texas was using the company’s partially automated driving system before the wreck, federal investigators said on Thursday.

Data from the 2022 Mustang Mach E SUV showed that Ford’s “Blue Cruise” driver-assist system was in use ahead of the 24 February crash, according to a preliminary report released by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB).

The crash is one of two recent fatal wrecks involving Ford Mustang Mach Es that are under investigation by the NTSB and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), which often send teams to investigate incidents involving automated technology.

The NTSB can only make recommendations, but NHTSA has the authority to take action, including seeking recalls for safety issues.

In both cases, the Mach Es hit vehicles stopped on freeways at night, and neither the driver nor the system were able to prevent the collisions. Ford says on its website that its driving systems do not replace human drivers, who have to be ready to take control at any time.

A company spokesperson would not comment on the NTSB report on Thursday, deferring to a previous statement saying that Ford is cooperating in the investigations.

The Texas crash occurred on Interstate 10 in San Antonio. The NTSB report says the Mach E struck the rear of a 1999 Honda CR-V that was stopped in the middle of three lanes around 9.50pm. The 56-year-old driver of the CR-V was killed.

Another driver who was able to avoid the CR-V told investigators that neither its tail nor hazard lights were working at the time.

The agency said it intends to issue safety recommendations to prevent similar crashes. It has said it opened the inquiry due to continued interest in advanced driver assistance systems and how vehicle operators interact with the new technology.

The other crash involving a Mach E killed two people around 3.20am on 3 March in the northbound lanes of Interstate 95 in Philadelphia.

The Pennsylvania state police said on Thursday that a Mach E was in the left lane when it struck a stationary Hyundai Elantra that earlier had collided with a Toyota Prius.

The Mach E hit the Hyundai, pushing it into the rear of the Prius. During the crash, the driver of the Prius, who was outside his vehicle, also was struck and thrown into the southbound lanes, the release said.

A police spokesperson said a person from the Hyundai was also on the roadway and was hit. Both victims, males aged 21 and 20, were pronounced dead at the scene.

A police news release on the crash says a criminal investigation is under way and a charge of homicide by motor vehicle while driving under the influence is possible against the 23-year-old woman driving the Mach E.

Ford’s Blue Cruise system allows drivers to take their hands off the steering wheel while it handles steering, braking and acceleration on highways. The company says the system isn’t fully autonomous and it monitors drivers to make sure they pay attention to the road. It operates on 97% of controlled access highways in the US and Canada, Ford says.

There are no fully autonomous vehicles for sale to the public in the US. Last year, General Motors’ Cruise self-driving car unit recalled all 950 of its cars following an accident in which one of its vehicles struck and dragged a pedestrian in San Francisco.

Both NHTSA and the NTSB have investigated multiple previous crashes involving partially automated driving systems, most involving Tesla’s Autopilot.

Tesla recently settled a lawsuit over a 2018 crash that killed an Apple engineer. In that case, Tesla maintained that the driver had failed to stay alert and take over driving before the crash. The settlement may have provided a blueprint for others suing over Autopilot.

Other companies have also struggled with attempts to produce self-driving or partially autonomous cars. Apple canceled its decade-long, multibillion-dollar effort to build a self-driving electric car earlier this year, following numerous setbacks in the program.

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Driver of electric Ford SUV was using automated system before fatal Texas crash, investigators say

FILE - A Ford sign is seen at a dealership in Springfield, Pa., April 26, 2022. The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating a March 3, 2024, crash near Philadelphia that killed two people and involved a Ford electric vehicle that may have been operating on a partially automated driving system. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke, File)

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DETROIT (AP) — The driver of a Ford electric SUV involved in a February fatal crash in Texas was using the company’s partially automated driving system before the wreck, federal investigators said Thursday.

Data from the 2022 Mustang Mach E SUV showed that Ford’s “Blue Cruise” driver-assist system was in use ahead of the Feb. 24 crash, according to a preliminary report released Thursday by the National Transportation Safety Board.

The crash is one of two recent fatal wrecks involving Ford Mustang Mach Es that are under investigation by the NTSB and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which often send teams to probe incidents involving automated technology.

The NTSB can only make recommendations, but NHTSA has the authority to take action including seeking recalls for safety issues.

In both cases, the Mach Es hit vehicles stopped on freeways at night, and neither the driver nor the system were able to prevent the collisions. Ford says on its website that its driving systems do not replace human drivers, who have to be ready to take control at any time.

A company spokeswoman wouldn’t comment on the NTSB report Thursday, deferring to a previous statement saying that Ford is cooperating in the investigations.

The Texas crash occurred on Interstate 10 in San Antonio. The NTSB report says the Mach E struck the rear of a 1999 Honda CR-V that was stopped in the middle of three lanes around 9:50 p.m. The 56-year-old driver of the CR-V was killed.

Another driver who was able to avoid the CR-V told investigators that neither its tail nor hazard lights were working at the time.

The agency said it intends to issue safety recommendations to prevent similar crashes. It has said it opened the probe due to continued interest in advanced driver assistance systems and how vehicle operators interact with the new technology.

The other crash involving a Mach E killed two people around 3:20 a.m. March 3 in the northbound lanes of Interstate 95 in Philadelphia.

The Pennsylvania State Police said Thursday that a Mach E was in the left lane when it struck a stationary Hyundai Elantra that earlier had collided with a Toyota Prius.

The Mach E hit the Hyundai, pushing it into the rear of the Prius. During the crash, the driver of the Prius, who was outside of his vehicle, also was struck and thrown into the southbound lanes, the release said.

A police spokeswoman said a person from the Hyundai also was on the roadway and was hit. Both victims, males ages 21 and 20, were pronounced dead at the scene.

A police news release on the crash says a criminal investigation is under way and a charge of homicide by motor vehicle while driving under the influence is possible against the 23-year-old woman driving the Mach E.

Ford’s Blue Cruise system allows drivers to take their hands off the steering wheel while it handles steering, braking and acceleration on highways. The company says the system isn’t fully autonomous and it monitors drivers to make sure they pay attention to the road. It operates on 97% of controlled access highways in the U.S. and Canada, Ford says.

There are no fully autonomous vehicles for sale to the public in the U.S.

Both NHTSA and the NTSB have investigated multiple previous crashes involving partially automated driving systems, most involving Tesla’s Autopilot. In past investigations, the NTSB has examined how the system functioned.

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Cruising the Moskva River: A short guide to boat trips in Russia’s capital

There’s hardly a better way to absorb Moscow’s atmosphere than on a ship sailing up and down the Moskva River. While complicated ticketing, loud music and chilling winds might dampen the anticipated fun, this checklist will help you to enjoy the scenic views and not fall into common tourist traps.

How to find the right boat?

There are plenty of boats and selecting the right one might be challenging. The size of the boat should be your main criteria.

Plenty of small boats cruise the Moskva River, and the most vivid one is this yellow Lay’s-branded boat. Everyone who has ever visited Moscow probably has seen it.

This option might leave a passenger disembarking partially deaf as the merciless Russian pop music blasts onboard. A free spirit, however, will find partying on such a vessel to be an unforgettable and authentic experience that’s almost a metaphor for life in modern Russia: too loud, and sometimes too welcoming. Tickets start at $13 (800 rubles) per person.

Bigger boats offer smoother sailing and tend to attract foreign visitors because of their distinct Soviet aura. Indeed, many of the older vessels must have seen better days. They are still afloat, however, and getting aboard is a unique ‘cultural’ experience. Sometimes the crew might offer lunch or dinner to passengers, but this option must be purchased with the ticket. Here is one such  option  offering dinner for $24 (1,490 rubles).

If you want to travel in style, consider Flotilla Radisson. These large, modern vessels are quite posh, with a cozy restaurant and an attentive crew at your service. Even though the selection of wines and food is modest, these vessels are still much better than other boats.

Surprisingly, the luxurious boats are priced rather modestly, and a single ticket goes for $17-$32 (1,100-2,000 rubles); also expect a reasonable restaurant bill on top.

How to buy tickets?

Women holding photos of ships promise huge discounts to “the young and beautiful,” and give personal invitations for river tours. They sound and look nice, but there’s a small catch: their ticket prices are usually more than those purchased online.

“We bought tickets from street hawkers for 900 rubles each, only to later discover that the other passengers bought their tickets twice as cheap!”  wrote  (in Russian) a disappointed Rostislav on a travel company website.

Nevertheless, buying from street hawkers has one considerable advantage: they personally escort you to the vessel so that you don’t waste time looking for the boat on your own.

Prices start at $13 (800 rubles) for one ride, and for an additional $6.5 (400 rubles) you can purchase an unlimited number of tours on the same boat on any given day.

Flotilla Radisson has official ticket offices at Gorky Park and Hotel Ukraine, but they’re often sold out.

Buying online is an option that might save some cash. Websites such as  this   offer considerable discounts for tickets sold online. On a busy Friday night an online purchase might be the only chance to get a ticket on a Flotilla Radisson boat.

This  website  (in Russian) offers multiple options for short river cruises in and around the city center, including offbeat options such as ‘disco cruises’ and ‘children cruises.’ This other  website  sells tickets online, but doesn’t have an English version. The interface is intuitive, however.

Buying tickets online has its bad points, however. The most common is confusing which pier you should go to and missing your river tour.

“I once bought tickets online to save with the discount that the website offered,” said Igor Shvarkin from Moscow. “The pier was initially marked as ‘Park Kultury,’ but when I arrived it wasn’t easy to find my boat because there were too many there. My guests had to walk a considerable distance before I finally found the vessel that accepted my tickets purchased online,” said the man.

There are two main boarding piers in the city center:  Hotel Ukraine  and  Park Kultury . Always take note of your particular berth when buying tickets online.

Where to sit onboard?

Even on a warm day, the headwind might be chilly for passengers on deck. Make sure you have warm clothes, or that the crew has blankets ready upon request.

The glass-encased hold makes the tour much more comfortable, but not at the expense of having an enjoyable experience.

Getting off the boat requires preparation as well. Ideally, you should be able to disembark on any pier along the way. In reality, passengers never know where the boat’s captain will make the next stop. Street hawkers often tell passengers in advance where they’ll be able to disembark. If you buy tickets online then you’ll have to research it yourself.

There’s a chance that the captain won’t make any stops at all and will take you back to where the tour began, which is the case with Flotilla Radisson. The safest option is to automatically expect that you’ll return to the pier where you started.

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