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
Tech company that owned and operated experimental high tech death machine say their regulatory reports were wrong because they are bad at ubiquitous 40 year old tech.
subhead:
An independent review
body:
The law firm, Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, was hired by Cruise
fuckin
Comments call it out straight away at least
Welcome to the ‘pay people to tell the public everything is fine’ era of late stage capitalism
To be fair that one is as old as journalism. I bet Ea-nāṣir paid off the Dilmun Daily for an editorial explaining that there has never been a single ingot of substandard copper out of his workshop, and all accusations to the contrary were from disgruntled competitors.
Sadly this is not about journalists, but about ‘independent’ accountants, and it is now done at scale, but yes it has been done before it just leads to bad places.
Ah yes, i thought you were commenting on the verge repeating the claim. When I think about Arthur Andersen’s involvement in the collapses of enron & worldcom I do vaguely remember it came out that they had a hilarious dress code but I guess didn’t have any rules against rampant corruption.
hilarious dress code but I guess didn’t have any rules against rampant corruption
Ah bikeshedding, dresscodes are easy, preventing corruption is hard, so lot more attention will be paid to dresscodes.
I don’t think it’s fair to call the verge journalism. It has many of the trappings of journalism, but writing shit on a public website a journalist does not make. Especially when that site looks like it’s gonna give my computer fucking herpes. Dogshit website should be banned.
The Verge is a lot like Ars Technica. There are some stellar, top notch journalists at both outlets doing important work, and there’s a firehose of press release regurgitation and bootlicking from the other side of the house, and if you don’t pay attention to individual journalists’ bylines you have absolutely no indicator whatsoever which is which. Like Buzzfeed was, back in the good days of Buzzfeed News, except Buzzfeed at its lowest was just TMZ crossed with Quizilla.
this is the exact same Cruise whose CEO started posting absolute bullshit on the orange site about this shortly before being fired. as usual, removing the CEO did nothing – the whole company’s thing is lying their asses off
Okay, since everyone here seems to have a fundamental misunderstanding of how this process works.
It is a normal and usual thing for companies to hire an outside law firm to independently and unbiasedly have them create a report about how something happened. This is why the report is hosted on the law firm’s website. So no one can claim that the company that ordered the investigation altered it in any way or manipulated the findings.
Do you all really think law firms would risk their reputations by purposefully changing or omitting something from their report that they’re going to publish for the whole world to see? Especially when it can easily be found out they lied if the topic at hand ever gets to the discovery phase during a trial?
This is how this works, Hockey Canada did the same exact thing for the 2018 world junior sexual assault case after the London Ontario police had already dropped all charges. And once that report was concluded the police took the information they gathered and used it to reopen the case and file new charges.
It’s better that the company accused of the wrong doing is paying for the law firm to do the investigation. Would you rather tax payers pay for it through the regulators having to do an investigation? And many times the regulators are hamstrung by resource restraints or limits on their ability to investigate. A law firm specifically hired to investigate something for a company has none of those restrictions. And if the company refuses to give them access to what they feel is critical information then the law firm discloses that in their report.
Could the Verge have worded this a little more critically? Sure. But you’re all out here pretending a law firm is gonna doctor their report for the company that hired them and that’s just not how this works.
tax payers
ew gross don’t say that
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.
The report flatly does not 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).
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[…]”
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]”.
Again, 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!
I’ve only read about 30 pages of the report
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.
I’m a grad student. Last year I wrote the proposed article in our union contract concerning discrimination and harassment grievances.
As part of this I went and looked at a bunch of actual cases in which universities covered for malefactors. Commissioning “independent” law firms who proceeded to generate whitewashed bullshit reports was often a key step in trying to shut down victims, enough so that I included language specifically targeting this tactic (I’m too lazy to go get the link but if you feel like digging through legal documents you can check out the first proposed revision of article IX in the Brown university contract with GLO). this absolutely happens
I remember when the first articles about this accident came out I immediately matched one of the photos with the location on Google Maps and thought “huh, that’s pretty far away from the intersection”.
Meanwhile Cruise has the video of the moment of collision and doesn’t put two and two together until hours and hours later? Like car stopped on pedestrian being 20 feet away from initial collision should make most people think bad news bears pretty fast, but according to that report they were too hyper focused on blaming the other other driver to think that maybe just maybe they did anything wrong.
And then deliberately omitted this information from the media once they did learn it, letting their older innacurate press release stand (a.k.a. lying).
And then oopsied showing a bunch of regulators the most important part, or even mentioning it, y’know using words. They were too busy trying to figure out how to present stuff to put them in the best possible light. a.k.a either actively lying (absolutely, but good luck proving this) or gross self-serving incompetence, probably both.
It sounds like their incidence response was getting a few hundred people typing furiously in a chatroom about how to talk to regulators rather than some orderly process to actually figure stuff out.
The one person who figured things out first was on the scene, but apparently they never bothered asking him.
Also while I’m here,
A self driving car dragging a victim is the silicon valley ethos of “move fast and break things” applied to human.
Self-driving cars require a strong engineering culture to do right, one that is clear was entirely absent at Cruise from this report.
Did they even consider the possibility of a pedestrian being dragged / run over when designing their software? Because that sounds like kiiinda an obvious thing to consider. The most fundamental rule of the road is not to drive where you can’t see, and it seems like Cruise violated this by designing a car completely unaware of what is beneath it.
Even toddlers have object permanence.
Did they even consider the possibility of a pedestrian being dragged / run over when designing their software?
From the report (pp 83 of the appendix), it seems like there’s no camera to monitor the undercarriage: it detected it was part of an accident and tried to find a side of the road to stop at, but then further detected something fucky (technical term) with one of the wheels so it just stopped. But at no point did it directly detect a whole human underneath it. It looks like it took ~4.5s to decide to stop after travelling ~20ft at 7.7 mph.
I’ll be honest I can’t even imagine how their business could have been ruled legal without clear corruption
yeah the thing that’s so utterly absurd is that those vehicles are literally fucking telemetry++++ on wheels.
I refuse to believe, on rational (hue hue) presumption alone, that they didn’t have the facility to detect this. and there are plenty of other indications that they knew, and that they intentionally obscured this
how this thing is handled makes me hate that legal system (from afar), doubly so because of how much hegemony means it has impact elsewhere
