Cruise Gets Bruised

 

General Motors' autonomous-vehicle operation is called Cruise, and just last August, it received permission (along with Google's Waymo) to operate driverless robotaxis in San Francisco at all hours of the day and night.  This made the city the only one in the United States with two competing firms providing such services.

 

Only a week after the California Public Utilities Commission acted to allow 24-hour services, a Cruise robotaxi carrying a passenger was involved in a collision with a fire truck on an emergency call.  The oncoming fire truck had moved into the robotaxi's lane at an intersection surrounded by tall buildings and controlled by a traffic light, which had turned green for the robotaxi.  Engineers for Cruise said that the robotaxi identified the emergency vehicle's siren as soon as it rose above the ambient noise level, but couldn't track its path until it came into view, by which time it was too late for the robotaxi to avoid hitting it.  The passenger was taken to a hospital but was not seriously injured.

 

As a result, Cruise agreed with the Department of Motor Vehicles to reduce their active fleet of robotaxis by 50% until the investigation by DMV of this and other incidents was resolved.

 

In many engineering failures, warning signs of a comparatively minor nature appear before the major catastrophe, which usually attracts attention by loss of life, injuries, or significant property damage.  These minor signs are valuable indicators to those who wish to prevent the major tragedies from occurring, but they are not always heeded effectively.  The Cruise collision with a fire truck proved to be one such case.

 

On Oct. 2, a pedestrian was hit by a conventional human-piloted car on a busy San Francisco street.  This happens from time to time, but the difference in this case was that the impact sent the pedestrian toward a Cruise robotaxi.  When the unfortunate pedestrian hit the robotaxi, the vehicle's system interpreted the collision as "lateral," meaning something hit it from the side.  In the case of lateral collisions, the robotaxi is programmed to stop and then pull off the road to keep from obstructing traffic.

 

What the system didn't take into account was that the pedestrian was still stuck under one of the robotaxi's wheels, and when it pulled about six meters (20 feet) to the curb, it dragged the pedestrian with it, causing critical injuries. 

 

California regulators reacted swiftly.  The DMV revoked Cruise's license, and the firm announced it was going to suspend driverless operations nationwide, including a few vehicles in Austin, Texas, and other locations.  There were only 950 vehicles in the entire U. S. fleet, so the operation is clearly in its early stages. 

 

But now, after Cruise has done software recalls for human-piloted vehicles as well as driverless ones, it is far from clear what their path is back to viability.  According to an AP report, GM had big hopes for substantial revenue from Cruise operations, expecting on the order of $1 billion in 2025 after making only about a tenth of that in 2022.  And profitability, which would require recouping the billions GM already invested in the technology, is even farther in the future than it was before the problems in San Francisco.

 

The consequences of these events can be summarized under the headings of good news and bad news.

 

The good news:  Nobody got killed, although being dragged twenty feet under the wheel of a robot car that clearly has no idea what is going on might be a fate worse than death to some people.  After failing to heed the warning incident in August, Cruise has finally decided to react vigorously with significant and costly moves.  According to AP, it is adding a chief safety officer and asking a third-party engineering firm to find the technical cause of the Oct. 2 crash.  So after clearly inadequate responses to the earlier incidents, a major one has motivated Cruise management to act. 

 

The bad news:  Several people were injured, at least one critically, before Cruise realized that, at least in the complex environs of San Francisco, their robotaxis posed an unacceptable risk to pedestrians.  I'm sure Google's Waymo vehicles have a less-than-perfect safety record, but whatever start-up glitches they suffered are well in the past.  Cruise does not have the luxury of experience that Waymo has, and is in a sense operating in foreign territory.  Maybe Detroit would have been a better choice than San Francisco for a test market, but that would have neglected the cool factor, which is after all what is driving the robotaxi project in the first place.

 

Back when every elevator had a human operator, there was a valid economic and engineering argument to replace the manually-controlled units with automatic ones.  The main reason was to eliminate the salary of the operator.  Fortunately, the environment of an elevator is exceedingly well defined, and the relay-based technology of the 1920s sufficed to produce automatic elevators which met all safety requirements and were easy enough for the average passenger to operate.  Nevertheless, some places clung to manual elevators as recently as the 1980s, as I recall from a visit to a tax consultant in Northampton, Massachusetts, whose office was accessed by means of an elevator controlled not by buttons but by a rather seedy-looking old man.

 

Being an old man myself now, I come to the defense of everyone on the street who would like to confront real people behind the wheel, not some anonymous software that may—may!—figure out I'm a human being and not a tall piece of plastic wrap blowing in the wind, in time to stop before it hits me.  Yes, robotaxis are cool.  Yes, they save on taxi-driver salaries, but this ignores the fact that one of the few entry-level jobs that recent immigrants to this country can get which actually pays a living wage is that of taxi driver, many of whom are independent entrepreneurs. 

 

Robotaxis may be cool, but dangerous they should not be.  GM may patch up their Cruise operation and get it going again, but then again it may go the way of the Segway.  Time will tell.

 

Sources:  An article from the USA Today Network in the online Austin American-Statesman for Nov. 16, 2023 alerted me to the fact that Cruise was ramping down its nationwide operations, including those in Austin.  I consulted AP News articles at https://apnews.com/article/cruise-general-motors-pedestrian-recall-software-crash-bf08c0c6e7914649750b4dde598af5fc

(Nov. 8, 2023) and at https://apnews.com/article/san-francisco-cruise-robotaxi-crash-e721a81c1366c71a03c0aa50aa2e98f3 (Aug. 19, 2023). 

Explosions are Bad for Business: PG&E's $1.6 Billion Fine

Back in 1956, the California utility company Pacific Gas & Electric laid a new gas pipeline, designated "132", to supply the growing needs of San Francisco and cities to its south along the peninsula.  The 30-inch-diameter pipeline's sections were welded together, and in one length near the town of San Bruno, a lengthwise seam was welded in one section.

For many years, the pipeline carried natural gas northward to San Francisco and surrounding communities, and as the population grew, PG&E increased the pressure the pipeline carried so as to keep up with growing demand.  In 1956, weld-inspection methods were fairly crude, and no one knew for sure how much pressure the pipeline could stand.

PG&E is regulated by the California Public Utility Commission (CPUC), so its profits and mode of operation are a creature of government as much as a product of private industry.  It is also a large publicly held corporation, ranking at 183 on the Fortune 500 list in 2014.  Under law, PG&E was obliged to take numerous safety measures to ensure that its aging pipelines were not a public hazard.  At one point, the firm got authorization to collect a special fee to be spent on safety improvements and upgrades.  Somewhere along the line, some of this safety-fee money was diverted instead to increases in executive salaries.  PG&E was also supposed to keep up-to-date GIS (geographic information system) records of the location and conditions of its pipelines, including seams such as the one in the section lying under San Bruno.  In many cases, it failed to do so, as PG&E staffer Bill Manegold found when he joined the company in 2005.  

In 2008, instead of performing a laborious pipeline-inspection procedure that would have involved shutting down the line, the firm intentionally "spiked" the pressure on Line 132, in a mistaken belief that if they failed to test it in this way, federal regulators would lower the maximum allowable pressure the line could carry.  According to state regulators, such spiking in turn required an inspection of the line for damage, an inspection that PG&E never performed.  In 2007 and again in 2010, PG&E asked the CPUC for permission to spend $5 million on upgrading sections of Line 132, but the work was not carried out.

Given this background, it may come as no surprise to you that on Sept. 9, 2010, residents of San Bruno heard a loud whooshing noise, followed by a tremendous explosion and fire.  The seam-welded portion of the line had ruptured.  In the ensuing holocaust in the middle of the residential neighborhood that had grown up around the pipeline, 38 homes were destroyed, dozens of people were injured, and eight persons died.  One of those killed, Jacqueline Greig, worked for the CPUC and had spent part of the summer investigating PG&E's plans to replace outdated pipelines.

Hundreds of lawsuits were filed against PG&E, and on April 9 of this year, the firm agreed not to contest a $1.6 billion fine levied against it by the CPUC.  (That amount is twice the company's total profits for 2014, incidentally.)  Reportedly, PG&E has in the meantime undertaken a massive effort to improve its safety and pipeline-inspection practices, but the CPUC is considering whether to break up the combined electric-gas utility into smaller pieces.

What went wrong here?  How could a large, supposedly competent organization of engineers and managers allow an old pipeline to be put at such risk that it explodes and destroys part of a neighborhood?  The National Transportation Safety Board, which investigated the accident, sums it up by saying it was an "organizational accident" that was the direct result of operational and managerial deficiencies. 

The CPUC is not innocent in this case either.  As the public entity charged with the responsibility of ensuring that private firms such as PG&E operate safely, it has come in for a lot of criticism as well.  Levying a fine that is twice a company's annual profits is something, but the real changes that have to happen are in the way PG&E operates.  And while fines are a form of punishment that companies understand, probably the most that fines can do is cause turnover in the executive suite, as disgruntled shareholders seek new leaders who won't let such a fiasco happen again.  There is no guarantee that the new managers will be any more competent than the previous set, except possibly in the matter of avoiding fines.

In all the words written about this disaster, I didn't see one that I think holds the key to avoiding such disasters in the future:  character.  You don't hear much discussion about character in the face of organizational failures, because we are trained to think of organizations like physicists think of air molecules:  as collections of particle-like people who will behave according to laws we can manipulate.  

There is something to the idea that even good people in a flawed organizational structure will end up doing bad things.  But even the best organizational structures cannot function well if the organization's people do not have strength of character, and a healthy respect, if not fear, of what can go wrong if their jobs are not done well.

The kind of fear that is needed was expressed well by a driver's ed instructor I had in high school, back in the days when high schools had driver's ed instructors.  She looked me straight in the eye and said, "You're about to sit behind the wheel of a machine that can kill people.  Every time you drive, you will be personally responsible for the safety of all the other drivers and pedestrians around you."  It put the fear of God in me with regard to how serious a matter driving was.  While I have not always lived up to that instructor's ideal, that fear I felt was a good thing in that it made me take driving seriously.

The ideal PG&E, and CPUC for that matter, would be composed of individuals whose memory of the San Bruno tragedy is never very far from their minds.  Not everyone working for those organizations is directly involved in safety matters.  But safety ought to be built into the consciousness of every employee to the extent that when those who are technically qualified to speak about safety say something's wrong and needs to be fixed, the entire organization should support all reasonable measures to ensure that those safety needs are addressed.  This includes things like replacing old lines when you get the money to do it, and spending ratepayer's money designated for safety on safety expenses, not extra pay for executives. 

It's a shame that eight people had to die to reveal the rottenness within the utility organizations responsible for the safety of California residents.  But sometimes, that's what it takes to bring strength of character back where it belongs.

Sources:  The AP article by Ellen Knickmeyer, "Utility won't appeal $1.6B penalty for blast" was carried by numerous outlets such as Yahoo News at http://news.yahoo.com/utility-wont-appeal-1-6-192700432.html;_ylt=A0LEV7sPUypVDxAAIZgnnIlQ.  I also referred to an article in the Los Angeles Times on the diversion of safety money to executive pay carried Mar. 25, 2015 at http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-puc-hearing-20150325-story.html, an article on the shoddy state of PG&E's GIS data carried on July 31, 2012 by www.sfgate.com at http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/PG-E-ignored-gaps-in-data-engineer-says-3752181.php, and the Wikipedia article "2010 San Bruno pipeline explosion".  PG&E's Fortune 500 ranking can be found at http://fortune.com/fortune500/pge-corporation-183/.