GM's self-driving car crashes into bus, automaker recalls 300 robotaxis

San Francisco, April 8

Automaker GM's self-driving car Cruise AV crashed into a city bus after its self-driving software failed to predict the movement of the vehicle. The company has now issued a voluntary recall to update the software in 300 robotaxis.

This issue resulted in a single collision on March 23, 2023, in which a Cruise AV inaccurately predicted the movement of an articulated San Francisco Municipal Transit Authority (MUNI) bus.

The Cruise self-driving software failed to accurately predict the movement of the bus and struck the back after "decelerating too late to avoid a rear-end collision with the bus".

Kyle Vogt, Cruise Founder and CEO, said that "fender benders like this rarely happen to our AVs, but this incident was unique."

"We do not expect our vehicles to run into the back of a city bus under any conditions, so even a single incident like this was worthy of immediate and careful study," he said in a statement.

The company then filed a voluntary recall with the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA).

"Less than an hour after the collision, we had fully assembled a team to investigate what happened. We also moved quickly to brief our state and federal regulators on the incident and made our team available to answer any questions they had," said the CEO.

Cruise said in the regulatory filing that the software recall was issued because of a "rare circumstance" in which the automated driving system caused the driverless robotaxi "to hard brake while making an unprotected left turn."