Cruise Says Hostility to Regulators Led to Grounding of Its Autonomous Cars

Cruise, the driverless car subsidiary of General Motors, said in a report on Thursday that an adversarial approach taken by its top executives toward regulators had led to a cascade of events that ended with a nationwide suspension of Cruise’s fleet and investigations by California and federal authorities, including the Justice Department.

The roughly 100-page report was compiled by a law firm that Cruise and G.M. hired to look into whether Cruise’s executives had misled California regulators about an October crash in San Francisco in which one of its vehicles dragged a woman 20 feet. The review found that while the executives had not intentionally misled state officials, they had failed to explain key details about the incident.

In meetings with regulators, the executives let a video of the crash “speak for itself” rather than fully explain how one of its vehicles — part of Cruise’s autonomous taxi service in the city — severely injured the pedestrian. The executives later fixated on protecting Cruise’s reputation rather than giving a full account of the incident to the public and media, according to the report, which was written by the Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan law firm.

Cruise also said the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission, as well as state agencies and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, were investigating how it had handled the incident.

The report is central to Cruise’s efforts to regain the public’s trust and eventually restart its business. Cruise has been largely shut down since October, when the California Department of Motor Vehicles suspended its license to operate because its vehicles were unsafe and the company misrepresented the incident. It responded by pulling its driverless cars off the road across the country, laying off a quarter of its staff and replacing Kyle Vogt, its co-founder and chief executive, who resigned in November, with new leaders.

Cruise didn’t name Mr. Vogt in a blog post summarizing the law firm’s review, but he was named throughout the report. Mr. Vogt declined to comment.