Cruise, the driverless taxi arm of General Motors (NYSE:GM), said it is pressing the pause button for all on-road vehicle operations in the US, affecting roughly 70 vehicles, after a number of incidents.
Driverless taxis developed by Cruise last month lost the right to operate in California after a chaotic rollout onto the roads of San Francisco that led to authorities suspending the licence and saying the vehicles "are not safe for the public's operation".
The following day, the company paused all its autonomous vehicle (AV) operations to "examine our processes, systems, and tools and improve how we operate".
In a blog post on Tuesday, Cruise said it would pause "all supervised and manual AV operations in the US" as "a further step to rebuild public trust while we undergo a full safety review".
It will continue to operate the vehicles in closed course training environments and maintain an active simulation program, it added.
The company is in the process of hiring a permanent chief safety officer, it added, and has also appointed a third-party safety expert to perform a full assessment of Cruise’s safety operations and culture, as well as the technical root cause analysis being carried out by engineering consultancy Exponent into the October 2 hit-and-run incident, where a non-Cruise vehicle knocked a pedestrian into the path of one of the AVs.
That work is ongoing and the board plans to expand Exponent’s remit to include a comprehensive review of safety systems and technology.