General Motors' autonomous car company, Cruise, has reportedly agreed to pay an 8-million to 12-million settlement to a woman who was hospitalized after getting dragged along the pavement by a self-driving taxi in San Francisco last year. The woman, a pedestrian, was struck by a hit-and-run vehicle at 5th and Market streets and thrown into the path of Cruise's self-driving car, which pinned her underneath, according to Cruise and authorities. The car dragged her about 20 feet as it tried to pull out of the roadway before coming to a stop. She sustained "multiple traumatic injuries" and was treated at the scene before being hospitalized. It's unclear when the settlement was reached or the exact amount, sources familiar with the situation told Fortune and Bloomberg.

In August 2016, WIRED visited the San Francisco offices of a young startup recently snapped up by a surprising buyer. General Motors acquired three-year-old Cruise for a reported $1 billion in hopes the straitlaced Detroit automaker could coopt the self-driving technology tipped to disrupt the auto industry. Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt--a scrappy Twitch cofounder who competed as a teen in BattleBots--said he intended to stick around, but to keep running the driverless-car tech developer like a startup. He'd be out of a job, he predicted, if he couldn't hack the self-driving thing in 10 to 15 years. GM's financial reports show it losing $8.2 billion on Cruise since the start of 2017, and it has sunk at least $1.9 billion into the company this year.

Cruise has paused all its driverless operations, the company has announced on LinkedIn and X. The GM-backed self-driving firm explained that it's taking time to examine its "processes, systems and tools" and that it will "reflect on how [it] can better operate in a way that will earn public trust." Cruise has been thrust under the spotlight recently after the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) suspended its permits to operate driverless vehicles in the state due to several safety related issues. The California Public Utilities Commission also suspended the license giving Cruise the right to charge passengers for robotaxi rides. One of the latest incidents involving a Cruise vehicle happened in early October when a woman was hit by another car and was hurled in front of one of the company's driverless vehicles.

Being available now, will HAD play a role as a steppingstone to adoption of full L4 systems? And, if HAD has strong uptake, will it motivate the truck OEMs to accelerate their own rollout of such systems? In the near term, it will be fascinating to see what transpires with Traton and their U.S. subsidiary Navistar, now that their technology partnership with TuSimple is kaput. I'm quite certain they aren't sitting on their hands; they seek to have a strong play in the AV truck market as a strategic necessity. For highway operations, current efforts aim to automate the "ramp to ramp" long haul, augmented by transferring the load to human driven trucks for the last mile.