Transport Accident

GM's robotaxi unit Cruise has agreed to pay a $500,000 for submitting a false accident report as part of a deferred prosecution agreement.

On Monday, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) fined Cruise, GM’s self-driving vehicle division, $1.5 million.

A Tesla Cybertruck veered off a Texas road and crashed into a culvert, bursting into flames and killing the driver, KHOU 11 Houston reported.

Tesla is facing yet more legal action over Autopilot after the parents of a motorcyclist who was killed in a crash involving a Model 3 sued the company. The plaintiffs, who also sued the driver of the Tesla, claimed that the car's driver assistant tech and other safety measures are “defective and inadequate.”

A deadly crash in Washington that took the life of a motorcyclist earlier this year was caused by a Tesla vehicle while it was in “Full Self Driving” mode. The Associated Press reported that investigators from the Washington State Patrol confirmed that a 2022 Tesla Model S involved in the fatal collision in April was in self-driving mode from the car’s event-data recorder.

Waymo is voluntarily recalling its robotaxis after one of them collided with a telephone pole in an alley enroute to pick up a passenger, The Verge reported. The vehicle was unoccupied and no bystanders were injured.

Back in 2019, the family of Apple engineer Wei Lun Huang (aka Walter Huang) sued Tesla a year after he was killed when his Model X crashed into a median in Mountain View while Autopilot was engaged. That case is officially closed, now that the automaker has settled the lawsuit on the very day jury selection was supposed to take place.

Last year, two Waymo robotaxis in Phoenix "made contact" with the same pickup truck that was in the midst of being towed, which prompted the Alphabet subsidiary to issue a recall on its vehicles' software. A "recall" in this case meant rolling out a software update after investigating the issue and determining its root cause. 

GM's driverless Cruise division is under investigation by both the Department of Justice (DoJ) and Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), The Washington Post has reported.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has ordered airlines to temporarily ground some Boeing 737 Max 9 planes for safety inspections after an Alaska Airlines plane lost a cabin panel during a flight on Friday with about 180 people on board.