Cruise will resume robotaxi tests after one of its cars ran someone over – The Verge

Cruise has announced that it’s resuming tests for its fleet of self-driving taxis in Phoenix, Arizona , though not with passengers just yet. The autonomous vehicle maker says it will start with humans behind the wheel, with no passengers and no autonomous driving mechanisms engaged.In California, lawmakers banned the GM subsidiary from operating its vehicles in the state after one of them ran over a San Francisco pedestrian and dragged them over 20 feet in October, after another vehicle threw the victim

into the robotaxi’s path. That was just weeks after another incident where one of Cruise’s vehicles collided with a fire truck after failing to properly yield to the truck’s emergency signals.The company’s been dealing with the fallout ever since; Cruise first paused operations nationwide and issued a software update to 950 of its vehicles to change how the cars respond to crash events, amidst multiple investigations into the incidents. They’ve caused something of a mass exodus in the company, starting with then CEO and co-founder Kyle Vogt and nine other leaders. Cruise also laid off 24 percent of its workforce shortly after.Cruise says its intent with renewed testing is to help improve its systems by collecting more road data to continue feeding its machine learning model, and that it hopes to eventually resume human-supervised autonomous tests in Phoenix. It picked the city, it says, based on its “strong history” of supporting automotive innovation and because many of its employees reside there.