Cruise, the self-driving car company owned by General Motors, confirmed to Reuters that its co-founder and chief product officer Daniel Kan has resigned. Kan's departure comes just a day after the company's CEO Kyle Vogt announced his resignation on X after a 10-year tenure. Kan is said to have announced his resignation over Slack, however, the reasoning for his departure has not been made clear by the company. The company's executive reshuffling follows a public relations nightmare that started last month when a Cruise robotaxi hit a pedestrian in San Francisco and pinned them under the vehicle. The parent company, GM, is still conducting a safety probe on the accident and both autonomous and manual vehicle operations at Cruise remain suspended.

The robotaxi company Cruise has been revving up for rapid growth. In August, California regulators granted carte blanche to the outfit in San Francisco, where its CEO has envisioned deploying 10 times more robotaxis than the several hundred it operated this summer. Meanwhile, Cruise, which is majority-owned by General Motors, announced expansions into a dozen other U.S. cities including Austin, Charlotte, Houston, Raleigh, and Washington. California just forced Cruise to hit the brakes. On Tuesday, the state's Department of Motor Vehicles suspended Cruise's permits to deploy driverless vehicles statewide.

Cruise will temporarily be deploying fewer autonomous vehicles in San Francisco while investigators are looking into "recent concerning incidents" involving its fleet. According to The New York Times and TechCrunch, the California Department of Motor Vehicles asked the company to cut its fleet in half after an incident wherein one of Cruise's robotaxis collided with a fire truck at an intersection. The fire truck had its sirens and red lights on and was responding to an emergency at the time, while the robotaxi has passengers onboard who sustained non-life-threatening injuries. In another, perhaps less controversial, incident a few days before that, a Cruise vehicle got stuck in wet concrete. The DMV said in a statement that its primary focus is "the safe operation of autonomous vehicles and safety of the public who share the road with these vehicles." It also added that it "reserves the right, following investigation of the facts, to suspend or revoke testing and/or deployment permits" if it determines that a company's vehicles is a threat to public safety.

General Motors Co.'s driverless-car unit has requested approval from California regulators to begin public testing of a shuttle that has no steering wheel or manual controls, showing the auto maker's determination to make progress on autonomous vehicles as rivals step back. GM's Cruise LLC division in August submitted an application to the California Department of Motor Vehicles, requesting permission to test its Origin driverless vehicle on San Francisco streets, according to a copy of the document obtained through a public records request. The California DMV began reviewing the application in late October, according to emails reviewed by The Wall Street Journal as part of the request. In its application, Cruise said it would begin test runs of the electric Origin in a confined area of San Francisco during limited hours and gradually expand over time. While GM and Cruise push ahead on plans to commercialize robotaxis, other players have pulled back, expressing doubts about whether the technology can support a viable business any time soon.

WASHINGTON--Federal prosecutors and securities regulators are investigating whether Tesla Inc. misled consumers and investors about how its advanced driver-assistance system performed, according to a person familiar with the matter. The Justice Department is looking at statements that Tesla and its executives made about the safety and functionality of the system known as Autopilot, the person said. The Securities and Exchange Commission is conducting a similar civil investigation, people familiar with the matter said. The company's Autopilot system is among the most well-known advanced driver-assistance systems and comes standard on new Teslas. The technology helps drivers with tasks such as steering and maintaining a safe distance from other vehicles on the highway, but does not make cars autonomous.

Washington, DC (CNN)"Full self-driving," the controversially named driver-assist feature from Tesla, may have finally met its match. They've all warned that "full self-driving" isn't really full self-driving. The technology is designed to navigate local roads with steering, braking and acceleration, but it requires an attentive human driver who's ready to take control and correct the system, which "may do the wrong thing at the worst time," Tesla warns. But while these critics may have the traditional bully pulpit of the Senate or other institutions, they have no real power to change any policy on their own. An actual impact may instead come from an unglamorous public agency, one that many Americans think of as only capable of offering customers long wait times: the Department of Motor Vehicles.

Tesla uses advertising language on its website for its Autopilot and Full Self-Driving products that's untrue and misleading to customers, the California DMV said. According to The Los Angeles Times and The Wall Street Journal, the agency has filed complaints with the California Office of Administrative Hearings, accusing the automaker of making statements "not based on facts" that make it seem like its vehicles are capable of full autonomous driving. The DMV pointed to the name of the products themselves in the complaints, as well as to other misleading language on Tesla's website. "All you will need to do is get in and tell your car where to go. If you don't say anything, your car will look at your calendar and take you there as the assumed destination. Your Tesla will figure out the optimal route, navigating urban streets, complex intersections and freeways."

The review could carry major implications for the company headed by Elon Musk, which has deployed beta software it dubs "Full Self-Driving" to more than 12,000 vehicles on public roads without trained test drivers. Currently, the company deploys over-the-air-updates with the software features to drivers who have been granted early access or passed a safety screening, in addition to paying up to $10,000. The company says the drivers must pay attention at all times.

Motional has announced it wants to more than double its number of employees in the state, and most of them will work in Los Angeles as human operators for self-driving cars that will learn, inch-by-inch, mile-by-mile, how to drive themselves. Until Motional gets the required permits from the California DMV, the self-driving car fleet will have to always have human drivers behind the wheel and ready to step in at a moment's notice. Motional is already testing vehicles in Las Vegas, Pittsburgh, Boston, and Singapore. Initially, the vehicles will map the roads, and self-driving tests will be conducted once that stage is completed. The first stage will focus on the Santa Monica area, where Motional has set up an office and an operations facility. Furthermore, Motional will hire people for its new research and development office in San Francisco, so those interested in career opportunities in this field should check out the company's website.

A Tesla engineer has informed California regulators that the electric vehicle company might not have a fully self-driving vehicle ready for this year. The information comes from documents dated May 6 exchanged between the California Department of Motor Vehicles and several Tesla employees, including CJ Moore, the company's autopilot engineer. The documents were released by the legal transparency group PlainSite, which got them under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). In January, Tesla chief Elon Musk said he was "highly confident the car will be able to drive itself with reliability in excess of human this year." "Tesla is at Level 2 currently. The ratio of driver interaction would need to be in the magnitude of 1 or 2 million miles per driver interaction to move into higher levels of automation," California DMV noted in the memo.