General Motors announced Thursday that it is putting the brakes on its driverless cars, halting a service that provides driverless rides in multiple cities.
The move comes days after California revoked GM’s permits to test and operate fully driverless vehicles on the state’s roads.
The California DMV said the move was due in part to Cruise, GM’s self-driving vehicle technology subsidiary, withholding video and information about a crash in which a pedestrian was dragged by a Cruise vehicle after being struck first by a different hit-and-run driver.
“We have decided to proactively pause driverless operations across all of our fleets while we take time to examine our processes, systems, and tools and reflect on how we can better operate in a way that will earn public trust,” Cruise said late Thursday in a series of posts on X, formerly Twitter.
“This isn’t related to any new on-road incidents,” Cruise said. “We think it’s the right thing to do during a period when we need to be extra vigilant when it comes to risk, relentlessly focused on safety and taking steps to rebuild public trust.”
Besides operations in San Francisco that were suspended by authorities, Cruise was offering rides in driverless cars in Houston, Dallas and Austin, Texas, as well as Phoenix and Miami.
Cruise said it wil continue with “supervised AV operations,” which is its term for autonomous vehicle rides that have a human driver behind the wheel ready to take control of the vehicle should an emergency arise.
But fully driverless ride hailing services are a key to GM’s plan to eventually transform its business model, selling rides rather than vehicles to consumers and making more money off the vehicle during its operational life rather than through a straight sale soon after it is built.
GM said the driverless vehicles are safer than human-driven cars. The company has published a study clai