Trisha Thadani, The Washington Post , The Washington Post; How a robotaxi crash got Cruise’s self-driving cars pulled from Californian roads
"Here in California, the whiplash from approval to ban in just two months highlights the fragmented oversight governing the self-driving car industry — a system that allowed Cruise to operate on San Francisco’s roads for more than three weeks following the October collision, despite dragging a human pinned underneath the vehicle...
Ed Walters, who teaches autonomous vehicle law at Georgetown University, said that driverless technology is critical for a future with fewer road fatalities because robots don’t drive drunk or get distracted. But, he said, this accident shows that Cruise was not “quite ready for testing” in such a dense urban area...
Under the DMV’s autonomous vehicle program, companies are asked to publicly report collisions involving driverless cars only when they are in test mode. That means if an incident like the Oct. 2 crash occurs while the company is technically operating as a commercial service, the company does not have to publicly report it as an “Autonomous Vehicle Collision Report.”"
