Cruise Pedestrian Dragging Incident Report

Cruise has launched supplies from an investigation into the pedestrian dragging incident and associated exterior communication transparency failures of final October. There’s a lot to unpack, however remarkably little of it really has to do with security. Most of it appears to be an train in blaming senior management (who’ve largely been sacked) and explaining why the issues had been extra attributable to misguided people and poor management quite than malefaction. 

The reasons within the report embody some fairly exceptional occasions. Repeated web disruptions throughout a number of conferences just for the regulatory viewers when exhibiting the movies that affected the pedestrian dragging half.  Mixed with deliberately not exhibiting the disrupted parts to others, together with particularly the press. And failing to appropriate mistaken impressions that had been favorable to Cruise (whereas aggressively attempting to repair ones that had been unfavorable). And leaving the unhealthy half out of public statements. And a paralegal who simply did not notice they need to be placing the pedestrian dragging half right into a report back to NHTSA. Twice. And never speaking to exterior events who attended conferences to listen to their aspect of the story in getting ready this very investigative report when some key factors had combined evidentiary help.

No matter what you would possibly consider the report veracity, my security takeaways are:

1. These experiences don’t really handle security and security processes. Initially Cruise mentioned these subjects could be addressed. Nevertheless the Quinn Emanuel report particularly states these are out of scope, and as a substitute limits inquiry to regulatory compliance and media relations points. The Exponent report is clearly restricted to root trigger for that particular crash. Maybe somebody is engaged on an unbiased take a look at security and security processes, however it’s not talked about wherever I may discover.
2. A pivotal second (maybe this would be the pivotal second looking back) was within the timeline (web page 12) Oct 3, 3:21 AM the place the Director of Techniques Integrity for Cruise created a video that, on the request of Cruise authorities affairs, ignored the strike of the pedestrian and subsequent dragging. My recollection from listening to no less than one journalist is that this video was later proven to journalists. An intentional choice to not inform the entire reality to the general public gave regulators ammunition in charge Cruise for holding again whatever the final information of these discussions.
3. The considerably redacted Exponent report has some new details about the crash dynamics, together with the car velocity at impression. These are of curiosity to understanding the foundation trigger, however have little to do with a lot larger security considerations. The very remaining sentence of the report is essentially the most telling, and precisely summarizes the massive security concern for this explicit mishap: “After the AV contacted the pedestrian, an alert and attentive human driver would remember that an impression of some type had occurred and wouldn’t have continued driving with out additional investigating the scenario.”

Cruise’s slim technical downside boils right down to their car persevering with driving although it knew that some type of impression had occurred. Their regulatory/governance downside of the second is the scope and intent of the cover-up.

Cruise’s larger security issues are out of scope for this report, and from all the things I’ve seen stay unaddressed. That matter must be resolved for Cruise to stay viable.