In Phoenix, Austin, Houston, Dallas, Miami, and San Francisco, hundreds of so-called autonomous vehicles, or AVs, operated by General Motors’ self-driving car division, Cruise, have for years ferried passengers to their destinations on busy city roads. Cruise’s app-hailed robot rides create a detailed picture of their surroundings through a combination of sophisticated sensors, and navigate through roadways and around obstacles with machine learning software intended to detect and avoid hazards.

AV companies hope these driverless vehicles will replace not just Uber, but also human driving as we know it. The underlying technology, however, is still half-baked and error-prone, giving rise to widespread criticisms that companies like Cruise are essentially running beta tests on public streets.

Despite the popular skepticism, Cruise insists its robots are profoundly safer than what they’re aiming to replace: cars driven by people. In an interview last month, Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt downplayed safety concerns: “Anything that we do differently than humans is being sensationalized.”

The concerns over Cruise cars came to a head this month. On October 17, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration announced it was investigating Cruise’s nearly 600-vehicle fleet because of risks posed to other cars and pedestrians. A week later, in San Francisco, where driverless Cruise cars have shuttled passengers since 2021, the California Department of Motor Vehicles announced it was suspending the company’s driverless operations. Following a string of highly public malfunctions and accidents, the immediate cause of the order, the DMV said, was that Cruise withheld footage from a recent incident in which one of its vehicles hit a pedestrian, dragging her 20 feet down the road.

In an internal address on Slack to his employees about the suspension, Vogt stuck to his message: “Safety is at the core of everything we do here at Cruise.” Days later, the company said it would voluntarily pause fully driverless rides in Phoenix and Austin, meaning its fleet will be operating only with human supervision: a flesh-and-blood backup to the artificial intelligence.

Even before its public relations crisis of recent weeks, though, previously unreported internal materials such as chat logs show Cruise has known internally about two pressing safety issues: Driverless Cruise cars struggled to detect large holes in the road and have so much trouble recognizing children in certain scenarios that they risked hitting them. Yet, until it came under fire this month, Cruise kept its fleet of driverless taxis active, maintaining its regular reassurances of superhuman safety.

“This strikes me as deeply irresponsible at the management level to be authorizing and pursuing deployment or driverless testing, and to be publicly representing that the systems are reasonably safe,” said Bryant Walker Smith, a University of South Carolina law professor and engineer who studies automated driving.

In a statement, a spokesperson for Cruise reiterated the company’s position that a future of autonomous cars will reduce collisions and road deaths. “Our driverless operations have always performed higher than a human benchmark, and we constantly evaluate and mitigate new risks to continuously improve,” said Erik Moser, Cruise’s director of communications. “We have the lowest risk tolerance for contact with children and treat them with the highest safety priority. No vehicle — human operated or autonomous — will have zero risk of collision.”

“These are not self-driving cars. These are cars driven by their companies.”

Though AV companies enjoy a reputation in Silicon Valley as bearers of a techno-optimist transit utopia — a world of intelligent cars that never drive drunk, tired, or distracted — the internal materials reviewed by The Intercept reveal an underlying tension between potentially life-and-death engineering problems and the effort to deliver the future as quickly as possible. With its parent company General Motors, which purchased Cruise in 2016 for $1.1 billion, hemorrhaging money on the venture, any setback for the company’s robo-safety regimen could threaten its business.

Instead of seeing public accidents and internal concerns as yellow flags, Cruise sped ahead with its business plan. Before its permitting crisis in California, the company was, according to Bloomberg, exploring expansion to 11 new cities.

“These are not self-driving cars,” said Smith. “These are cars driven by their companies.”

Kyle Vogt — co-founder, president, chief executive officer, and chief technology officer of Cruise — holds an articulating radar as he speaks during a reveal event in San Francisco on Jan. 21, 2020.

Problems With Children and Holes

Several months ago, Vogt became choked up when talking about a 4-year-old girl who had recently been killed in San Francisco. A 71-year-old woman had taken what local residents described as a low-visibility right turn, striking a stroller and killing the child. “It barely made the news,” Vogt told the New York Times. “Sorry. I get emotional.” Vogt offered that self-driving cars would make for safer streets.

Behind the scenes, meanwhile, Cruise was grappling with its own safety issues around hitting kids with cars. One of the problems addressed in the internal, previously unreported safety assessment materials is the failure of Cruise’s autonomous vehicles to, under certain conditions, effectively detect children. “Cruise AVs may not exercise additional care around children,” reads one internal safety assessment. The company’s robotic cars, it says, still “need the ability to distinguish children from adults so we can display additional caution around children.”

In particular, the materials say, Cruise worried its vehicles might drive too fast at crosswalks or near a child who could move abruptly into the street. The materials also say Cruise lacks data around kid-centric scenarios, like children suddenly separating from their accompanying adult, falling down, riding bicycles, or wearing costumes.

The materials note results from simulated tests in which a Cruise vehicle is in the vicinity of a small child. “Based on the simulation results, we can’t rule out that a fully autonomo