The $9 Billion Question: What Cruise Teaches Every CEO About Governing AI
On the night of October 2, 2023, a pedestrian in San Francisco was struck by a human-driven car and thrown into the path of a driverless Cruise robotaxi. The vehicle braked hard on impact and then, following its programming, attempted to pull over to the curb, dragging the trapped pedestrian roughly twenty feet at seven miles per hour (Korosec, 2023). Within three weeks, California regulators suspended Cruiseā€™s operating permits. Within two months, the CEO had resigned. And within fourteen months, General Motors walked away from a business it had invested more than $9 billion to build (Brulte, 2024).
It would be comforting to file this away as a self-driving-car story. It is not. When Michael Haiden and I examined the Cruise crisis for a peer-reviewed critical incident in the Journal of Critical Incidents (Allsopp & Haiden, 2026), what struck us was not the failure of the technology but the collision itself, after all, it began with a human driver. What destroyed Cruise was what happe...