A person claiming to be a Cruise employee sent an anonymous letter to California regulators in which he expressed concern that the company was launching its robo-taxi service too soon. According to the letter, seen by TechCrunch, the employee cited the fact that Cruise robo-taxis often malfunction in some way, get stranded on the street, and often block traffic or emergency vehicles as one of his main concerns.
The letter also states that employees generally believe this company is not ready to launch to the public, but there is a fear of admitting this due to leadership and investor expectations. Cruise responded to this – “safety is the top priority here” – with the results of a survey of more than 2,000 employees conducted by this company in April 2022, with 94 percent of those surveyed agreeing with this statement.
The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), which is responsible for issuing permits for driverless cars in California, said it is looking into the issues raised by the letter.
The CPUC reportedly issued a driverless deployment permit to Cruise in early June, which will allow the General Motors-owned company to begin charging for self-driving cab service in San Francisco. Cruise began commercial operations roughly three weeks ago.
Under the CPUC’s resolution giving Cruise the green light, the commission has the authority to suspend or revoke a permit for self-driving cars at any time if it finds that unsafe practices become apparent.
Cruise said its relationship with regulators is transparent and that communication between the two is frequent and consistent. The company also said it strictly complies with various reporting requirements and provides additional information to the CPUC as needed.
The employee’s concerns were originally brought to the CPUC in May, just weeks after a fleet of Cruise vehicles stopped on a San Francisco street for nearly two hours, blocking traffic and an intersection. cruise did not say what caused the problem, but the vehicles need to be recovered through a combination of remote assistance and manual retrieval.
“Currently (as of May 2022) there are frequent incidents of vehicles from our San Francisco fleet entering a ‘VRE’ or vehicle retrieval, either individually or in clusters. When this occurs, vehicles are stranded, often blocking traffic in the lane and potentially blocking emergency vehicles. Sometimes it is possible to remotely assist a vehicle to pull over safely, but there are also situations where the fallback system also fails and vehicles cannot be remotely maneuvered out of the lane they are blocking until they are physically towed to a facility,,” wrote the employee, who identified himself as a father and a safety-critical systems employee who has worked at Cruise for many years.
In addition, he reveals a potentially “chaotic environment” within Cruise, particularly around the company’s internal security reporting system, which Cruise employees use to report any type of concerns they have about security. The author of the letter claims he had submitted a security issue, but six months later, the ticket was still active, meaning the company’s risk assessment of the issue itself had not been completed.
That means the note will remain in triage indefinitely, he said, in part because Cruise has no required turnaround time for such notes.
“I don’t know if my experience with our security reporting system is representative of most situations, but I believe it is at least indicative of a very chaotic environment that allows this sort of thing to happen.”
The letter also noted that Cruise did not prioritize the recording of core system functions and that the company intentionally withheld the results of investigations into crashes and other sensitive, potentially damaging matters involving Cruise vehicles from most employees.
In June, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration conducted a special investigation into a crash involving a Cruise vehicle in San Francisco that was known to have caused minor injuries.
“As an employee working on safety-critical systems, the only reason I can think of for withholding this type of information from employees like myself is for optics and damage control purposes, which I believe is inconsistent with a safety-first culture,” the self-described employee wrote.
Right now, TechCrunch cannot confirm whether the author of the letter is actually a Cruise employee. Emails sent to the email address provided in the letter went unanswered, and the CPUC hasn’t told TechCrunch whether the agency itself was able to verify his employment.
Cruise spokesman Drew Pusateri told TechCrunch, “Our security record is tracked, reported and published by multiple government agencies. We’re proud of that, and that speaks for itself.”
