General Motors has issued a recall for its Cruise autonomous vehicles after a pedestrian was dragged in a crash.
The recall involves 950 driverless cars that may respond improperly after a crash. Many of the cars are being used as part of a supervised test fleet of autonomous taxis in San Francisco, transporting passengers without a human driver.
The company said the vehicles need an update to the collision detection subsystem of the Cruise Automated Driving Systems (ADS) software, according to a notice made public by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
The recall comes after a crash on Oct. 2 in San Francisco that left a pedestrian critically injured. Another vehicle with a person behind the wheel struck a pedestrian and "propelled" the victim into the immediate path of the Cruise AV.
In the event of a collision, the Cruise's Collision Detection Subsystem is "designed to perform a maneuver to minimize safety risks and other disruption." The system detects the collision and elects a post-collision response based on "the characteristics of the collision, such as the other road actors involved in the incident, the location of impact and the perceived severity." In many cases, the vehicle pulls over out of traffic. In other cases, it stops and remains stationary.
The problem, according to GM, is that the Collision Detection Subsystem may cause the Cruise to pull over out of traffic instead of remaining stationary -- especially after a collision with something positioned low on the ground in the path of the vehicle.
That's exactly what happened during the Oct. 2 crash. When the pedestrian entered the path of the Cruise on the ground, the vehicle "braked aggressively" but still struck the victim.
"The Cruise [driving software] inaccurately characterized the collision as a lateral collision and commanded the AV to attempt to pull over out of traffic, pulling the individual forward, rather than remaining stationary," the automaker said.
On Oct. 26, the automaker "determined that a collision with a risk of serious injury could recur with the Collision Detection Subsystem every 10 million - 100 million miles of driving on average." It also proactively paused operation of its driverless fleet in order to further assess and address the underlying risk.
The automaker said it decided to announce the voluntary recall out of "an abundance of caution and in hopes of adding transparency to the public's understanding of this singular incident."
Cruise said its software update fixes the issue. With the update, the Cruise AV would have remained stationary during the October 2 incident, the company said.
"Cruise has deployed the remedy to its supervised test fleet, which remains in operation. Cruise will deploy the remedy to its driverless fleet prior to resuming driverless operations," the notice said.
Cruise AVs have never been offered for sale to third parties and are solely owned by Cruise or GM. As such, there are no owners to notify.
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