Cruise admits to false report in 2023 dragging of San Francisco pedestrian
Autonomous vehicle company Cruise LLC agreed to a $500,000 fine Thursday after admitting to a false report following a crash last year in which one of its vehicles dragged a pedestrian in San Francisco.
According to a statement from the U.S. Attorney's office of the Northern District of California, the San Francisco-based company entered into a deferred prosecution agreement in which Cruise admits and accepts responsibility.
"Companies with self-driving cars that seek to share our roads and crosswalks must be fully truthful in their reports to their regulators," said Martha Boersch, Chief of the Office of the U.S. Attorney's Criminal Division, said in a statement Thursday afternoon.
On the night of Oct. 2, 2023, a woman was struck by a human driver in the crosswalk at Market and Fifth streets and was thrown into the path of the autonomous Cruise vehicle, which ran her over, prosecutors said. The vehicle did not detect the pedestrian and dragged her more than 20 feet as it attempted to pull over to the side of the road.
Federal prosecutors said Cruise subsequently filed a report with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) describing the incident, but omitted reference to the secondary movement and dragging.
The morning after the crash, Cruise held a videoconference with NHTSA in which they provided a verbal summary of the incident but did not include a description of the dragging. Later that day, Cruise submitted a one-day report to NHTSA that also omitted the dragging.
"That omission rendered the report inaccurate and incomplete in light of NHTSA's requirements," prosecutors said.
Prosecutors said Cruise provided NHTSA a copy of the video which showed the dragging, but the company did not correct the accident report or the disclosure in a later report submitted 10 days after the incident.
"Today's deferred prosecution agreement holds Cruise, LLC and its employees accountable for their lack of candor in a federal regulatory compliance action," Cory LeGars, Special Agent-in-Charge, U.S. Department of Transportation Office of Inspector General (DOT-OIG), Western Region, said in a statement.
Following the collision, the California Department of Motor Vehicles suspended the company's autonomous vehicle deployment and driverless testing permits. Several key leaders departed the company and hundreds of employees were also laid off.
In January, the company offered to pay $75,000 to settle an investigation by the California Public Utilities Commission into the collision.
The company has also agreed to pay a $1.5 million penalty and submit a corrective action plan to NHTSA as part of a consent order reached in September.
