Actual framing:
Cruise wasn’t hiding the pedestrian-dragging video from regulators — it just had bad internet / An independent review of an incident in which a driverless Cruise vehicle dragged a pedestrian over 20 feet concludes the company has connectivity issues.
My expectations for journalists are low but goddamn
Yes, it’s normal to hire independent investigations, and I’m not sure why Verge worded it this way (sarcasm?), the actual 200 page report contains a lot of condemnation of Cruise…but inconsistently. The report does seem to massage the situation in favor of Cruise in several places.
I’ve only read about 30 pages of the report, but I don’t see it anywhere consider whether the connectivity issues were intentional, despite Director Matt Woods streaming the video from his home computer (!?) in three consecutive meetings without trying to fix the issue or have someone else play it (it was available to everyone via Slack, including Cruise execs who were in-person at the meetings).
In fact, on page 54 it says he just paused it before the dragging happened: “Cruise expected and intended its October 3 meeting with NHTSA to follow its past practices in which Cruise employees would show a video of an accident or incident and respond to regulators’ questions based upon what they observed in the video. But this did not happen for at least two reasons. There were internet connectivity issues and the Director of System Integrity Wood paused the video at the point of impact, and then never resumed playing it.”
Despite simply pausing the video at the moment of impact, the summary on page 13 says: “Virtual meeting with NHTSA representatives. Wood shows Full Video, again having internet connectivity issues causing video to freeze and/or black-out in key places including after initial impact.”
Page 61-63 shows that there’s debate whether they even showed the DMV the full 45s video or a 12s one that cuts before the dragging, with Cruise employees recalling both possibilities. Quinn Emanuel even hired an engineering consulting company to do forensics on Wood’s home PC, which concluded: “It is not possible to verify [which video he showed]”.
Yet, the summary of that meeting: “Cruise holds hybrid in-person and virtual meeting with DMV and CHP representatives. Wood shows Full Video”
These summaries seems extremely charitable to the point of inaccuracy, to me!
EDIT: extremely tangential but I find it funny that Quinn Emanuel founder John Quinn’s wikipedia proudly announces that he has a podcast where he has interviewed, among others, NYC Mayor Eric Adams and Depp’s lawyer Camille Vasquez.
holy fuck, thank you for doing the legwork on this. the details are fascinating as a case study in how “independent” investigations launder details like this; something that we (obviously excluding our guest gentleposter in this assessment) knew was happening from the general stench of what we’ve seen coming out of Cruise, but it’s still fun to see the company’s strategy of lying like a 5 year old except about a major public safety risk continue to fall apart
The report is a grim but fascinating read.
“Also talked to [a CHP official] for about 30 minutes this evening. He said they felt like they were ‘punked’ but also got him to a place where he said I am still your advocate, I believe in this technology, both of us could have done better here and we should pay more attention and @Matthew Wood’s verbal walk through as he did today is as helpful as it is to see the video. TLDR - we got to a good place - and he apolgized [sic] but felt like he needed to say what the team was thinking. It’s a good lesson to us that they rely on us a lot more than we anticipate and the trust that we’ve built us great but it’s fragile just as all relationships. We rehabilitated the dynamic I believe.”
CHP = California Highway Patrol. Complete farce of a system.