Waymo has voluntarily issued a software recall to all 672 of its Jaguar I-Pace robotaxis after one of them collided with a telephone pole.
This is Waymo’s second recall.
NHTSA confirmed to TechCrunch that it has received Waymo’s recall documents and is processing them for publication on its website.
The accident that prompted Waymo’s second recall happened on May 21 when a Waymo vehicle in Phoenix, driving without a human safety operator, collided with a telephone pole in an alley during a low speed pullover maneuver.
The Waymo vehicle slowed down to pull over and struck a pole at a speed of 8 miles per hour.
Patrick Morrisey, VP of corporate communications at GM, told TechCrunch that the reduction in spending is still in effect, despite today’s capital infusion.
In total, Cruise has already raised over $15 billion, per Crunchbase data.
In October, a Cruise robotaxi ran over and dragged a pedestrian 20 feet in San Francisco.
The pedestrian had initially been hit by a human-driven car and landed in the path of a Cruise robotaxi.
In other states where AV companies don’t need to acquire permits, Cruise is already making a comeback.
Waymo, the self-driving company under Alphabet, began testing its robotaxis in Atlanta on Tuesday, adding another city to its ever-expanding testing and deployment domain.
Read about our cross-country training program:… pic.twitter.com/ORNxAbjJ3A — Waymo (@Waymo) April 16, 2024Like many other states, Georgia’s regulation of AVs is almost nonexistent, meaning Waymo can technically drop fully autonomous vehicles on the streets today without a safety driver, provided it meets the state’s minimal risk conditions.
Earlier this month, Waymo began mapping Washington, D.C., and in November 2023, the company began winter testing robotaxis in Buffalo.
In March, California regulators approved Waymo to grow its commercial robotaxi service across the San Francisco peninsula and on San Francisco freeways, which unlocks a route to San Francisco International Airport.
A Waymo robotaxi also hit and killed a dog in June 2023.
TechCrunch Mobility: Cruise robotaxis return and Ford’s BlueCruise comes under scrutiny Plus, a Faraday Future whistleblower case and humanoid robots in car factoriesWelcome back to TechCrunch Mobility — your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation.
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It was another wild week in the world of transportation, particularly in the EV startup and automated driving industries.
Exoes, a French-based startup that developed battery cooling technology for EVs, raised €35 million ($37.5 million) from BpiFrance and Meridiam Green Impact Growth Fund.
Both former employees have filed lawsuits claiming the troubled EV company has been lying about some of the few sales it has announced to date.
Cruise is redeploying robotaxis in Phoenix after nearly five months of paused operations, the company said in a blog post.
Cruise will resume manual driving of its autonomous vehicles to create maps and gather road information in certain cities, starting with Phoenix, the company said Tuesday.
Cruise has not announced when or where it will resume driverless operations.
The company’s main operations were historically based in San Francisco, but Cruise lost its permits to operate there following the accident.
Cruise began expanding its paid service area in the Phoenix area in August 2023.
What went wrong at Cruise, a pivot at Vroom and a home for Tesla’s Dojo supercomputerTechCrunch Mobility is a weekly newsletter dedicated to all things transportation Sign up here — just click TechCrunch Mobility — to receive the newsletter every weekend in your inbox.
Autonomous vehicle and EV startups — even those that have since gone public — are trying to cut costs in hopes of extending their capital runway.
Now, a few little birds are telling us that Canoo and Faraday Future — both EV startups that went public via mergers with special purpose acquisition companies — are either reducing salaries or furloughing employees.
So what went wrong at Cruise?
Cruise also revealed that the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission have also opened investigations into the company.
Cruise lost the permits it needed to operate commercially in the state of California and has since grounded its fleet elsewhere.
Problems with Cruise began almost immediately after the company received the last remaining permit required to operate its robotaxi service commercially throughout San Francisco.
On that day, a pedestrian crossing a street in San Francisco was initially hit by a human-driven car and landed in the path of a Cruise robotaxi and run over.
Even after obtaining the Full Video, Cruise did not correct the public narrative but continued instead to share incomplete facts and video about the Accident with the media and the public.
This conduct has caused both regulators and the media to accuse Cruise of misleading them.”This story is developing …
In this edition of WiR, we cover Cruise slashing 24% of its driverless workforce (and, relatedly, Tesla’s autopilot recall), Twitch’s new nudity policy conundrum, Adobe’s updated app design language and Instagram launching a generative AI–powered background editor.
Most readGemini comes to more apps: Google’s Gemini GenAI models — specifically Gemini Pro, a lightweight version of a more capable model, Gemini Ultra, set to arrive in the coming months — is making its way into more Google products.
Duet AI, the company’s suite of dev assistance tools for code completion and generation, will soon start using Gemini.
So will AI Studio (formerly MakerSuite), Google’s AI app design experience on the web, and Vertex AI, the tech giant’s managed AI dev platform for enterprises.
Called Spectrum 2 (no surprise there), the new design system backs off a bit from the austerity of the current Spectrum design and adds quite a few more splashes of color.
An email, penned by newly minted president and CTO Mo Elshenawy, was sent this morning to the entire 3,800-person workforce.
Cruise is targeting non-engineering jobs in the layoffs, particularly those people who worked in the field, commercial operations and corporate staffing, according to the email.
Engineering, a category that makes up the bulk of the Cruise workforce, is largely being preserved, according to the content of the email and discussions with internal sources.
The layoffs have been largely expected at Cruise for weeks now.
GM and the Cruise board have been scrambling ever since the October 2 incident put the company in the crosshairs of state, local and federal agencies.
Cruise spokesperson Erik Moser confirmed the departures and shared a statement, but declined to comment on whether these employees were fired.
“Today, following an initial analysis of the October 2 incident and Cruise’s response to it, nine individuals departed Cruise.
A video, which TechCrunch viewed a day after the incident, showed the robotaxi braking aggressively and coming to a stop over the woman.
Morale at Cruise has been low since the October 2 incident, with employees pointing the finger at poor management that didn’t prioritize safety at the company.
Initial layoffs affected contract workers who had jobs cleaning, charging and maintaining the vehicles as well as answering customer support inquiries.
