Cruise: The Rise and Fall of GM's Robotaxi

General Motors bought Cruise, a San Francisco start-up, in 2016 and poured billions into it, with SoftBank, Honda and Microsoft investing alongside. Cruise tested in the hardest streets in America and moved fast: driverless test rides in 2021, the first permit in California to charge for driverless rides in June 2022, and, with Waymo, approval to run paid service around the clock across San Francisco in August 2023. It announced expansions to Austin, Houston, Phoenix, Dallas and Miami, and a purpose-built shuttle, the Origin, with no steering wheel.

The city's fire and transit officials objected throughout 2023 that robotaxis were stalling in intersections, blocking emergency vehicles and driving into active fire scenes. Cruise vehicles were involved in a string of widely shared incidents: cars stopping in clusters when a cellular network was congested, a collision with a fire truck, a vehicle driving into wet concrete. The company's tone stayed confident, and the incidents kept coming.

That night a woman crossing Fifth Street was hit by a human-driven car and thrown into the path of a Cruise robotaxi. The Cruise braked, struck her, and then, trying to pull to the curb as it was programmed to do after a collision, dragged her about 20 feet. She survived with severe injuries. Cruise initially showed regulators and reporters video of the impact but not of the dragging. On October 24 the California DMV suspended its permits, citing risk to the public and a failure to disclose the full sequence.

Cruise halted every driverless operation nationwide within days. Its chief executive resigned; an outside review commissioned by GM found leadership had failed to be forthcoming with regulators. The company recalled its software, laid off a quarter of its staff, paid a $1.5 million NHTSA penalty for incomplete reporting and later a $500,000 criminal fine, and returned to the road only with safety drivers. In December 2024 GM ended the robotaxi business altogether, citing the cost and time needed to scale, and absorbed Cruise into its driver-assistance work.

The lessons the rest of the field drew were about transparency with regulators as much as about software: the suspension order named the withheld video, not the crash itself.