Former NHTSA head blasts Cruise’s ‘People are horrible drivers’ advert | TechCrunch

A former administrator of the Nationwide Freeway Visitors Security Administration (NHTSA) has responded to a full-page ad taken out in a number of main newspapers by Cruise, Common Motors’ self-driving subsidiary, that calls humans terrible drivers.

The advert factors to the practically 43,000 crash fatalities in 2022 and promotes autonomous automobiles as the answer.

“Utilizing the ache and struggling of these deaths for self-promotion of an unproven and unsafe product is unscrupulous,” stated Joan Claybrook, a lawyer who served as head of NHTSA from 1977 to 1981, and as president of shopper advocacy group Public Citizen from 1982 to 2009.

Claybrook referred to as the advert a ploy from GM to recoup a few of its funding within the billions of {dollars} spent to develop Cruise’s self-driving automobiles. In accordance with GM’s 2022 earnings report, the automaker misplaced $1.9 billion on Cruise in 2022, up from $1.2 billion in 2021. GM has stated it expects Cruise to usher in $50 billion yearly in income by 2030.

Cruise revealed the advert final week within the San Francisco Chronicle, The New York Instances, the Los Angeles Instances and The Sacramento Bee. The message from Cruise got here because the California Public Utilities Fee delayed, for the second time, a listening to on increasing Cruise’s and competitor Waymo’s permits to cost for robotaxi rides all through town 24/7, amid mounting strain from opposition.

“You could be a superb driver, however many people aren’t,” reads the advert. “Folks trigger hundreds of thousands of accidents yearly within the US. Cruise driverless vehicles are designed to avoid wasting lives.”

Within the advert, Cruise factors to its “1 Million Mile Safety Report,” developed with the College of Michigan Transportation Analysis Institute and Virginia Tech Transportation Institute to check naturalistic human ride-hail driving to Cruise’s autonomous driver. The examine discovered that Cruise automobiles, which have collected over 1 million miles of driving, resulted in 53% fewer collisions, 92% fewer collisions as the first contributor and 73% fewer collisions with significant threat of damage when benchmarked in opposition to human drivers in a comparable driving surroundings.

“A million miles travelled by autonomous automobiles (AVs) at first look could appear to be a considerable quantity however is lower than 0.00003 % of the greater than three trillion miles pushed yearly on U.S. roads,” stated Claybrook in an announcement launched by Advocates for Freeway and Auto Security. “Moreover, it’s infinitesimal in comparison with the 310 billion miles pushed in California every year. By comparability, in a single work week, human ride-hailing drivers in San Francisco had been practically tripling the a million miles Cruise took a yr to build up.”

Claybrook referred to as Cruise’s security report restricted and its course of opaque, noting that Cruise has not launched the comparative examine from the schools it partnered with within the report. A spokesperson for Cruise instructed TechCrunch the corporate can’t share the examine with out the permission of College of Michigan and Virginia Tech, however that the corporate plans to supply extra info within the close to future.

Whereas Cruise’s AVs haven’t been in any deadly accidents whereas driving in San Francisco, the corporate has come below hearth for malfunctioning automobiles stopping in the middle of traffic, blocking different automobiles, emergency automobiles and public transit. A mixture of aggravated residents, San Francisco’s hearth chief, the law enforcement officials’ affiliation and the SFMTA have all expressed considerations in regards to the security and efficacy of AVs after many such incidents.

In response to Cruise automobiles turning into immobilized whereas working on public roads and incidents when the robotaxis could have engaged in inappropriately laborious braking, NHTSA final December opened a preliminary investigation into the automobiles. The company didn’t reply in time to TechCrunch to supply an replace.