A little more than a year after a Cruise robotaxi dragged a woman in San Francisco, the company dodged a criminal charge by admitting that it misled federal regulators about what happened.
Authorities accused Cruise of impeding an investigation into the crash by failing to provide a description or video of the dragging in a meeting with federal transportation officials the morning after the crash. A report submitted later that day also omitted the dragging.
The General Motors-owned company has agreed to pay a $500,000 fine and accept responsibility for the criminal charges laid out by the U.S. Justice Department. Cruise is also required to cooperate with government investigations, implement a safety compliance program, and provide annual reports on that progress.
The deferred prosecution deal comes about a month and a half after Cruise was hit with a $1.5 million fine by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
The pedestrian-dragging incident that touched off the regulatory and criminal probes took place in October 2023, when a woman was thrown in the path of a Cruise vehicle on Market Street in downtown San Francisco. The robotaxi halted, but its sensor system failed to detect that there was a person beneath it, so it wound up dragging the woman more than 20 feet as it pulled over to the side of the road.
Under federal regulations, Cruise was required to report such crashes to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
Although Cruise later provided the video to NHTSA officials, the company failed to correct the incident report in a timely manner.
“Federal laws and regulations are in place to protect public safety on our roads,” Martha Boersch, the U.S. Attorney’s Criminal Division chief, said in a news release Thursday. “Companies with self-driving cars that seek to share our roads and crosswalks must be fully truthful in their reports to their regulators.”
The dragging incident threw a wrench in Cruise’s expansion plans and led to its once-ubiquitous fleet of robotaxis with cutesy names getting pulled from streets nationwide.
Federal and state officials also launched investigations into the company and how it met disclosure requirements in the wake of the crash. In June, a California Public Utilities Commission judge approved a separate $112,500 settlement to end the agency’s probe into the dragging.
Several top executives — including founder and CEO Kyle Vogt — resigned or were fired in the aftermath of the crash, and Cruise cut hundreds of jobs as it scaled back.
In September, Cruise announced it would soon return to the Bay Area with mapping vehicles in Sunnyvale and Mountain View — but that each car would have a driver behind the wheel.
Cruise President Craig Glidden said the company will adhere to the deferred prosecution agreement as it moves forward under new leadership “and with a firm commitment to transparency with our regulators.”