Cruise Omitted Pedestrian Dragging in Self-Driving Car Incident CA DMV Summary

This is pretty damning. They clearly went out of their way to withhold the dragging until the dam burst and they admitted to the pullover maneuver in their blogpost [1]. There's no doubt that admitting it up front would have hurt, but this has got to be another case where the cover-up was worse than the crime. I can't say I'm surprised though, as an observer in the AV space it seemed pretty clear that Cruise was moving too fast for their own good. They must've been under intense investor pressure, which is why they tried to sweep it under the rug in the first place.

It does make you wonder about their internal rationalizations though, after all few people think they're the baddie. Probably something like "We're so close, and this was an extremely long-tail incident initiated by human driver. The public/DMV wouldn't judge us fairly, and we'll handle this edge case in an update."

Things were already looking dire when they canceled the stock buyback program mid-event (leaving people with tax-liabilities for what are probably now worthless RSUs [2]). Monday will be interesting, I expect that this the end of Cruise as we know it.

[1] https://getcruise.com/news/blog/2023/a-detailed-review-of-th... [2] https://techcrunch.com/2023/11/16/cruise-suspends-employee-s...