After a recent incident in which Cruise’s self-driving car dragged a pedestrian down the street, the DMV decided to remove the company’s vehicles from the road.

According to Cruise’s report, the driver of the Nissan struck the pedestrian and threw her into the other lane in front of the Cruise vehicle, which then hit her. Although the car tried to stop, the reaction of the car was not fast enough because everything happened very quickly. Then the car tried to move out of the lane, not knowing that it was dragging the injured pedestrian. When it stopped, the wheel of the car was on the leg of the pedestrian. An ambulance arrived and took the injured person away.

A few days later, representatives of the California Department of Motor Vehicles had a meeting with the Cruise company where the video of the accident was shown. However, the DMV accuses the company of not showing the full video, but only the part where the pedestrian was hit. The company denies this.

This is not the first time that the vehicles of this company have been charged. Previously, these vehicles would stop in traffic when they could not safely pass into the other lane. It is assumed that this time too the software did not understand that the car was pulling the pedestrian.

Self-driving cars appeared in 1995 when Navlab5, which was the fifth of ten cars that were retrofitted by The Robotics Institute, was successfully piloted from Pittsburgh to San Diego. Today we have about 30 companies that use self-driving cars, and all of them are working on improving the technology to make vehicles safer.

Source: Reuters