NEW YORK, Aug 22 (Reuters): The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said it was closing its preliminary investigation into the hard braking and immobilization issues in 1,194 autonomous ride-hailing vehicles operated by General Motors' Cruise unit.
The NHTSA said on Thursday it was closing the evaluation, started in December 2022, after a review of Cruise's recall and data analysis, which showed a decrease in hard braking incidents following software updates.
The robotaxi unit earlier this month filed a recall affecting all its vehicles equipped with automated driving systems in the United States.
The NHTSA said the Office of Defects Investigation has determined that Cruise vehicles were involved in 10 crashes and four of them resulted in injury of vulnerable road users, after analyzing hard braking data from 7,632 incidents commanded by Cruise's automated driving system.
Cruise still faces investigations by the US Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission following an accident last October in which one of its robotaxis struck a pedestrian and dragged her 20 feet (six meters).
The firm along with other self-driving vehicle technology companies such as Alphabet's Waymo and Amazon's Zoox have come under heavy regulatory scrutiny due to safety concerns after multiple crashes involving their vehicles.
Cruise, which resumed US operations in April with a small fleet of human-driven vehicles in Phoenix, Arizona, said it has updated the software in all supervised test fleet vehicles.
However, in response to the October accident and subsequent investigations, Cruise's CEO resigned last year and General Motors subsequently announced plans to scale back spending on the self-driving unit.
The California Public Utilities Commission, which regulates robotaxi operations in the state, has imposed the maximum penalty of $112,500 on Cruise for its failure to promptly provide complete information to the commission about the October crash.
