Internal documents: Cruise knew its cars struggled to detect large holes and sometimes had problems recognizing kids, prior to its California permitting crisis
The disclosures add technical detail to Cruise’s California breakdown: the DMV had already suspended Cruise’s deployment and driverless-testing permits, and the company then paused its driverless service nationwide. Earlier reports of traffic disruption and emergency-vehicle obstruction had already put robotaxi reliability under public scrutiny.
The reported difficulty identifying children and large road holes turns a permitting dispute into a question of what Cruise knew about edge-case performance before deployment. That matters because Cruise later recalled its entire 950-vehicle fleet for a software update after the San Francisco pedestrian incident.
First-order effects
Cruise faces sharper scrutiny over whether known perception limitations were adequately reflected in its safety case, deployment decisions, and communications with California regulators.
The findings reinforce the operational consequences of the permit suspension and driverless pause: Cruise must address not only a single incident, but reported weaknesses involving vulnerable road users and road conditions.
Second-order effects
Regulators evaluating Cruise’s return are likely to focus more closely on evidence for rare-but-severe detection failures, raising the burden of proof for any renewed driverless operations.
Waymo and other AV operators may face increased pressure to demonstrate how their systems handle children, road damage, traffic obstruction, and emergency access—the issues that had already eroded trust in San Francisco.
Third-order effects
If safety disclosures and post-incident recalls become central to permitting, robotaxi expansion will depend less on city-by-city launch authorization and more on sustained, auditable safety governance.
The episode points to a more regulator-led AV market, where the ability to maintain credible safety reporting and responsive oversight may become as important as fleet scale.
The trend: Robotaxi commercialization is shifting from rapid geographic rollout toward a higher-accountability model centered on demonstrated safety performance and regulator trust.
“I mean they're only children and this is AMERICA.....we won't let child safety get in the way of a quick buck!” — And that's exactly why most people are distrustful of new technology now. — https://theintercept.com/... [image]
Smells like criminal fraud, if we had a DOJ that prosecuted this kind of thing when committed by CEOs. — (Except for extremely winnable cases in which young people swindled rich people out of billions, as with SBF and E Holmes.) [embedded post]
there's a lot about our current moment that makes me pretty furious, but being an unwilling subject in these companies' self-driving experiments is sneaky high on the list
The Giants would like to announce that their jerseys next you will be sponsored by Asbestos Chews, the asbestos you can chew, now in three flavors (lemon, fruit punch, popcorn ceiling)
If Cruise wasn't in an existential moment last week... THEY SURE ARE NOW. If Cruise is to survive, a severe housecleaning must occur. Culture can't merely evolve. It must be rebooted. https://theintercept.com/... [image]
@samfbiddle This is just so remarkably shady, and self-driving cars got such a pass because a) the sheer power and influence of tech monopolies and b) the predominant assumption that self-driving cars *must* be safer because technology.
NEW: Internal company materials from Cruise show the self-driving car company knew its vehicles had trouble driving safely around children and couldn't detect giant holes in the road, but kept on cruising https://theintercept.com/...
“Behind the scenes ... Cruise was grappling with its own safety issues around hitting kids with cars.” This is a company that claims it can end the US road safety crisis — if only regulators will let it. https://theintercept.com/... [image]
This seems bad. One wonders how Cruise treats adults who may behave erratically. Trying to quickly and accurately classify all the different situations one runs into on the road is deep morass Cruise appears unready for, despite public reassurances. https://theintercept.com/... […
A Cruise spokesperson told me that it's not accurate to say their cars weren't detecting children, but rather they were at times failing to classify children as children.
Over the weekend, the NYT reported that Cruise's so-called self-driving cars saw remote human workers intervene *every 2.5-5 miles*. Now, @samfbiddle reports Cruise *knew* its cars could not consistently recognize small children and risked hitting them. https://theintercept.com/.…
~5 years ago a guy who's kind of my friend but mostly a friend of a friend, who works in trucking, was REALLY nasty and condescending to me about how we'd have driverless cars within two years and it takes all my self control not to start that argument again whenever i see him