Former NHTSA head blasts Cruise’s ‘Humans are terrible drivers’ ad

A former administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has responded to a full-page ad taken out in several major newspapers by Cruise, General Motors’ self-driving subsidiary, that calls humans terrible drivers. The ad points to the nearly 43,000 crash fatalities in 2022 and promotes autonomous vehicles as the solution. Claybrook called the ad a ploy from GM to recoup some of its investment in the billions of dollars spent to develop Cruise’s self-driving vehicles. Cruise published the ad last week in the San Francisco Chronicle, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and The Sacramento Bee. In response to Cruise vehicles becoming immobilized while operating on public roads and incidents when the robotaxis may have engaged in inappropriately hard braking, NHTSA last December opened a preliminary investigation into the vehicles.