A Crash Course for Robotaxis After a plane crash, the entire aviation industry learns from the failure. Autonomous vehicle companies should adopt a similar standard. On October 2, 2023, a hit-and-run driver struck a pedestrian in San Francisco, throwing her into the path of a Cruise robotaxi. The Cruise vehicle braked but could not avoid running her over. What happened next turned a traffic accident into a company crisis: The robotaxi’s software, which didn’t detect the pedestrian pinned beneath it, initiated a pullover maneuver and dragged her 20 feet across the pavement. Cruise then compounded the failure by submitting a crash report that omitted the dragging entirely. This set off a chain of events that led to the suspension of the company’s operating permit, the CEO’s resignation, and finally, General Motors shutting Cruise down. This episode sparked a reckoning for Cruise, but it should have triggered an examination across the whole autonomous vehicle industry. Instead, eight months later, a Waymo vehicle hit a metal barrier while turning and tried to pull over. The barrier hooked onto the Waymo, which continued to push it, scraping five parked vehicles before finally coming to rest. After contact in these incidents, both the Cruise and Waymo vehicles chose to move rather than stop. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration incident database shows that, in the two years since the Cruise disaster, robotaxis are repeating the same dangerous maneuvers: They keep moving after hitting cyclists, pedestrians, and pets. This pattern of the same types of accidents recurring does not stop there. Robotaxi passengers have repeatedly opened doors into oncoming traffic. Waymo cars illegally passed stopped school buses more than 20 times just in the last school year. The industry’s problem is not that accidents happen. It’s that the same ones keep happening. The United States