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G.M.’s Cruise Moved Fast in the Driverless Race. It Got Ugly.

Cruise has hired a law firm to investigate how it responded to regulators, as its cars sit idle and questions grow about its C.E.O.’s expansion plans.

By Tripp Mickle Cade Metz and Yiwen Lu

Tripp Mickle, Cade Metz and Yiwen Lu have been reporting throughout the year on the rollout of robot taxis in San Francisco.

Two months ago, Kyle Vogt, the chief executive of Cruise, choked up as he recounted how a driver had killed a 4-year-old girl in a stroller at a San Francisco intersection. “It barely made the news,” he said, pausing to collect himself. “Sorry. I get emotional.”

To make streets safer, he said in an interview, cities should embrace self-driving cars like those designed by Cruise, a subsidiary of General Motors. They do not get distracted, drowsy or drunk, he said, and being programmed to put safety first meant they could substantially reduce car-related fatalities.

Now Mr. Vogt’s driverless car company faces its own safety concerns as he contends with angry regulators, anxious employees, and skepticism about his management and the viability of a business that he has often said will save lives while generating billions of dollars.

On Oct. 2, a car hit a woman in a San Francisco intersection and flung her into the path of one of Cruise’s driverless taxis . The Cruise car ran over her, briefly stopped and then dragged her some 20 feet before pulling to the curb, causing severe injuries.

California’s Department of Motor Vehicles last week accused Cruise of omitting the dragging of the woman from a video of the incident it initially provided to the agency. The D.M.V. said the company had “misrepresented” its technology and told Cruise to shut down its driverless car operations in the state.

Two days later, Cruise went further and voluntarily suspended all of its driverless operations around the country, taking 400 or so driverless cars off the road. Since then, Cruise’s board has hired the law firm Quinn Emanuel to investigate the company’s response to the incident, including its interactions with regulators, law enforcement and the media.

The board plans to evaluate the findings and any recommended changes. Exponent, a consulting firm that evaluates complex software systems, is conducting a separate review of the crash, said two people who attended a companywide meeting at Cruise on Monday.

Cruise employees worry that there is no easy way to fix the company’s problems, said five former and current employees and business partners, while its rivals fear Cruise’s issues could lead to tougher driverless car rules for all of them.

Company insiders are putting the blame for what went wrong on a tech industry culture — led by the 38-year-old Mr. Vogt — that put a priority on the speed of the program over safety. In the competition between Cruise and its top driverless car rival, Waymo, Mr. Vogt wanted to dominate in the same way Uber dominated its smaller ride-hailing competitor, Lyft.

“Kyle is a guy who is willing to take risks, and he is willing to move quickly. He is very Silicon Valley,” said Matthew Wansley, a professor at the Cardozo School of Law in New York who specializes in emerging automotive technologies. “That both explains the success of Cruise and its mistakes.”

When Mr. Vogt spoke to the company about its suspended operations on Monday, he said that he did not know when they could start again and that layoffs could be coming, according to two employees who attended the companywide meeting.

He acknowledged that Cruise had lost the public’s trust, the employees said, and outlined a plan to win it back by being more transparent and putting more emphasis on safety. He named Louise Zhang, vice president of safety, as the company’s interim chief safety officer and said she would report directly to him.

“Trust is one of those things that takes a long time to build and just seconds to lose,” Mr. Vogt said, according to attendees. “We need to get to the bottom of this and start rebuilding that trust.”

Cruise declined to make Mr. Vogt available for an interview. G.M. said in a statement that its “commitment to Cruise with the goal of commercialization remains steadfast.” It said it believed in the company’s mission and technology and supported its steps to put safety first.

Mr. Vogt began working on self-driving cars as a teenager. When he was 13, he programmed a Power Wheels ride-on toy car to follow the yellow line in a parking lot. He later participated in a government-sponsored self-driving car competition while studying at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In 2013, he started Cruise Automation. The company retrofitted conventional cars with sensors and computers to operate autonomously on highways. He sold the business three years later to G.M. for $1 billion .

After the deal closed, Dan Ammann, G.M.’s president, took over as Cruise’s chief executive, and Mr. Vogt became its president and chief technology officer.

As president, Mr. Vogt built out Cruise’s engineering team while the company expanded to about 2,000 employees from 40, former employees said. He championed bringing cars to as many markets as fast as possible, believing that the speedier the company moved, the more lives it would save, former employees said.

In 2021, Mr. Vogt took over as chief executive. Mary T. Barra, G.M.’s chief executive, began including Mr. Vogt on earnings calls and presentations, where he hyped the self-driving market and predicted that Cruise would have one million cars by 2030.

Mr. Vogt pressed his company to continue its aggressive expansion, learning from problems its cars ran into while driving in San Francisco. The company charged an average of $10.50 per ride in the city.

After a Cruise vehicle collided with a Toyota Prius driving in a bus lane last summer, some people at the company proposed having its vehicles temporarily avoid streets with bus lanes, former employees said. But Mr. Vogt vetoed that idea, saying Cruise’s vehicles needed to continue to drive those streets to master their complexity. The company later changed its software to reduce the risk of similar accidents.

In August, a Cruise driverless car collided with a San Francisco fire truck that was responding to an emergency. The company later changed the way its cars detect sirens .

But after the crash, city officials and activists pressured the state to slow Cruise’s expansion. They also called on Cruise to provide more data about collisions, including documentation of unplanned stops, traffic violations and vehicle performance, said Aaron Peskin, president of San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors.

“Cruise’s corporate behavior over time has increasingly led to a lack of trust,” Mr. Peskin said.

With its business frozen, there are concerns that Cruise is becoming too much of a financial burden on G.M. and is hurting the auto giant’s reputation. Ms. Barra told investors that Cruise had “tremendous opportunity to grow” just hours before California’s D.MV. told Cruise to shut down its driverless operations.

Cruise has not collected fares or ferried riders in more than a week. In San Francisco, Phoenix, Dallas, Houston, Miami, and Austin, Texas, hundreds of Cruise’s white and orange Chevrolet Bolts sit stagnant. The shutdown complicates Cruise’s ambition of hitting its goal of $1 billion of revenue in 2025.

G.M. has spent an average of $588 million a quarter on Cruise over the past year, a 42 percent increase from a year ago. Each Chevrolet Bolt that Cruise operates costs $150,000 to $200,000, according to a person familiar with its operations.

Half of Cruise’s 400 cars were in San Francisco when the driverless operations were stopped. Those vehicles were supported by a vast operations staff, with 1.5 workers per vehicle. The workers intervened to assist the company’s vehicles every 2.5 to five miles, according to two people familiar with is operations. In other words, they frequently had to do something to remotely control a car after receiving a cellular signal that it was having problems.

To cover its spiraling costs, G.M. will need to inject or raise more funds for the business, said Chris McNally, a financial analyst at Evercore ISI. During a call with analysts in late October, Ms. Barra said G.M. would share its funding plans before the end of the year.

Tripp Mickle reports on Apple and Silicon Valley for The Times and is based in San Francisco. His focus on Apple includes product launches, manufacturing issues and political challenges. He also writes about trends across the tech industry, including layoffs, generative A.I. and robot taxis.  More about Tripp Mickle

Cade Metz is a technology reporter and the author of “Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought A.I. to Google, Facebook, and The World.” He covers artificial intelligence, driverless cars, robotics, virtual reality and other emerging areas. More about Cade Metz

Yiwen Lu reports on technology for The New York Times. More about Yiwen Lu

Driverless Cars and the Future of Transportation

An Appetite for Destruction: A wave of lawsuits argue that Tesla’s Autopilot software is dangerously overhyped. What can its blind spots teach us about Elon Musk, the company’s erratic chief executive ?

Along for the Ride: Here’s what New York Times reporters experienced during test rides in driverless cars operated by Tesla , Waymo  and Cruise .

The Future of Transportation?: Driverless cars, once a Silicon Valley fantasy, have become a 24-hour-a-day reality in San Francisco . “The Daily” looked at the unique challenges of coexisting with cars that drive themselves .

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California orders Cruise driverless cars off the roads because of safety concerns

A Cruise technician comes to restart a driverless car in San Francisco. Josh Edelson/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

A Cruise technician comes to restart a driverless car in San Francisco.

California has ordered the company Cruise to immediately stop operations of its driverless cars in the state. The Department of Motor Vehicles said on Tuesday that it was issuing the indefinite suspension because of safety issues with the vehicles.

"When there is an unreasonable risk to public safety, the DMV can immediately suspend or revoke permits," the DMV wrote in a statement. "There is no set time for a suspension."

The move comes after one of Cruise's driverless cars struck a pedestrian in downtown San Francisco earlier this month. The incident involved a woman who was first hit by a human driver and then thrown onto the road in front of a Cruise vehicle. The Cruise vehicle braked but then continued to roll over the pedestrian, pulling her forward, then coming to a final stop on top of her.

Rescuers used the jaws of life to remove the vehicle and free the woman. The pedestrian survived but sustained life-threatening injuries.

"Our teams are currently doing an analysis to identify potential enhancements to the AV's response to this kind of extremely rare event," said Navideh Forghani, a Cruise spokesperson.

Forghani said Cruise provided regulators a video of the incident and is complying with the DMV's order and "pausing operations." Those cars that have a human safety driver will be allowed to continue operating in the state.

The DMV originally gave Cruise a permit for 300 driverless vehicles in San Francisco, but it cut that number in half after one of its cars collided with a firetruck in August.

Driverless cars run by Cruise, which is owned by GM, and Waymo, which is owned by Alphabet, have been involved in numerous mishaps in the city over the past several months. They've run red lights , rear-ended a bus and blocked crosswalks and bike paths.

San Francisco's police and fire departments have also said the cars aren't yet ready for public roads . They've tallied more than 55 incidents where self-driving cars have gotten in the way of rescue operations . Those incidents include driving through yellow emergency tape, blocking firehouse driveways, running over fire hoses and refusing to move for first responders.

Despite those incidents, state regulators voted in August to allow self-driving car companies to expand their operations in San Francisco and other California cities. That prompted the city of San Francisco to file motions with the state demanding a halt to that expansion.

"We need actual people behind the wheel with a pulse and a brain that know how to maneuver in sticky situations," San Francisco Supervisor Shamann Walton said at Tuesday rally protesting the driverless cars. "These Cruise vehicles are dangerous on our streets. When they see tragedy or see danger or there's an obstacle in their way, all they know how to do is freeze."

Federal regulators are also looking at the safety of driverless cars. Last week, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened an investigation into Cruise citing pedestrian safety concerns.

The crackdown on Cruise comes as GM announced during its earnings call this week that it is intent on expanding its driverless car program in the U.S.

• driverless cars
• self-driving cars

Cruise: Driving the future of autonomous electric vehicles

Founded in 2013 in San Francisco, US, Cruise fulfils CEO Kyle Vogt ’s childhood dream of making self-driving cars a reality. Co-founded by Chief Product Officer Dan Kan , the company was acquired by General Motors in 2016 to bring more than a century of experience in designing and manufacturing vehicles to the autonomous vehicle (AV) effort.

Cruise has received $10B from well-respected companies and investors—including General Motors, Honda, Microsoft, T. Rowe Price, and Walmart—increasing its valuation 30x since being founded.

The Origin robotaxi — launched in early 2020 — is a bus-like vehicle built for the sole purpose of shuttling people around in a city autonomously.

In its first 15 months, Cruise AVs collectively drove one million driverless miles — a distance equivalent to more than 40 laps around the planet.

The fleet is all-electric, fuelled by electricity generated by solar panels, many in Californian farms as part of the Farm to Fleet programme that aims to bridge and boost transport and agriculture in the US, promoting renewable energy and increasing benefits for the companies. 

“The amount of development work to get from nothing to the level of performance to operate without a driver was enormous,” says Vogt.

“We still have a long way to go to generalise this, to make this work at massive scale everywhere. But the relative difficulty of that compared to doing the work that is already behind us is pretty small. And it’s do-able.

“We know what the bottlenecks are, like our mapping technology. If you told me tomorrow we needed to operate in 100 cities, we’d be in trouble. But we have a road map so that, by the time we are adding 20, 30 or 50 cities a year, the technology is there to support that.”

Boosting the community

In partnership with the National Federation of the Blind , Cruise is making cars that can be accessed independently by blind people, eliminating a critical accessibility barrier. 

During the height of the COVID-19 restrictions, Cruise repurposed its AV fleet to deliver meals to vulnerable people in the San Francisco area, alongside partnering with Walmart   on a self-driving delivery pilot in Arizona.

In partnership with nonprofits, the Cruise for Good programme is dedicated to providing at least 1% of the Cruise self-driving fleet to serving important community needs in every city, delivering meals and providing rides to vulnerable populations to build a more equitable transportation ecosystem.

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Other magazines that may be of interest - Sustainability Magazine | Energy Digital

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Why Cruise’s self-driving cars are still in first gear

Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt knows first-hand how difficult it is to create self-driving cars that are as capable as humans.

“You’ve got these metal machines bouncing around on four bags of air we call tires in an urban environment where people are breaking the laws and not acting predictably,” he says.

In February, General Motors-backed autonomous vehicle unit Cruise  debuted a driverless taxi service in San Francisco after initially testing it on employees. It follows Alphabet’s Waymo subsidiary  premiering autonomous taxis in Phoenix in 2020. Meanwhile, in December, autonomous car company Argo AI, Lyft , and Ford (an investor in Argo AI along with Volkswagen),  debuted autonomous rideshares in Miami.

These self-driving taxi services come after years of inflated expectations that autonomous cars would soon be widely available. Self-driving cars, it turns out, are more difficult to perfect than originally thought.

The deep learning that powers self-driving cars must learn to handle so-called edge cases, like a cat jumping out into a busy road. There’s also “the less glamorous work” required to make self-driving cars safe, Vogt says. Computers inside autonomous cars “can be like a laptop computer and just freeze up,” he says. If something goes wrong, the car must know how to detect the error and respond, like pulling over to the side of the road.

Additionally, autonomous cars must know how to deal with the “social aspects of driving,” like reacting to a police car that flashes its lights to signal that the self-driving car should pull over, Vogt says.

Cruise had to ensure that its vehicles could handle as many driving scenarios as possible before starting testing its service with employees in November. Since then, the company has provided “hundreds of rides,” with half of its trips since Feb. 1 being with members of the public, a Cruise spokesperson says.

Vogt acknowledged that company’s new ride-hailing service is “small-scale right now,” but he says it would soon expand, potentially to other cities. Currently, California’s Department of Motor Vehicles only allows Cruise to operate its taxi service from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m., when traffic is light and there are few pedestrians. The cars must also keep their speed under 30 miles per hour, and can’t operate in heavy rain or heavy fog.

While Cruise, Waymo, and other companies have been testing autonomous cars, electric car maker Tesla has been  offering customers “full self-driving” capabilities as part of a test since 2020. Some lawmakers argue that Tesla’s marketing is misleading because it gives consumers the false belief that they don’t need to pay attention to the road because of the technology’s capabilities.

Vogt says that he’s okay with describing “advanced driver support systems” like Tesla’s that still require people to pay attention on the road as “self-driving.” In his opinion, consumers can tell the difference between a car with self-driving features versus cars built by Cruise that require no human drivers. 

Ultimately, however, he prefers the term “driverless” when referring to fully-autonomous cars. 

“The distinguishing thing in a driverless car is the car truly works for you,” he says. “You sit in the backseat and kick back and do nothing.”

Jonathan Vanian  @JonathanVanian [email protected]

P.S. If you want to get more of Fortune’s exclusive interviews, investigations, and features in your inbox, then  sign up for Fortune Features  so you never miss out on our biggest stories.

A.I. IN THE NEWS

Facial recognition goes to war . Ukraine is using the facial-recognition software sold by the controversial startup Clearview AI , the company’s CEO told Reuters . Clearview AI is giving Ukraine free access to its database of faces so officials can “vet people of interest at checkpoints,” the report said. The company said that it has gathered 2 billion photos from the Russian social media service VKontakte to help power its facial-recognition software. 

Microsoft steps up its quantum game . Microsoft said it has demonstrated the ability to produce a phenomenon known as Majorana zero mode, a potentially major milestone. Quantum computing relies on so-called qubits that have the ability to more efficiently encode data than current transistor-based computer chips. But researchers are divided about the best way to produce stable qubits. Microsoft said that its breakthrough could pave the way for so-called topological quantum computers, which would be powered by a new kind of qubit that has only been theorized to exist.

Amazon heads to Virginia . Amazon  is partnering with Virginia Tech  to create The Amazon—Virginia Tech Initiative for Efficient and Robust Machine Learning, intended to offer doctoral students fellowships and create research projects dedicated to machine learning. Amazon previously selected Arlington, Va., as its second corporate headquarters, which it calls HQ2.

Healthy A.I. Cedars-Sinai Medical Center  has created its Artificial Intelligence in Medicine division for researching how A.I. can be used to solve medical problems and improve clinical care. “Through the use of applied artificial intelligence, we can solve existing gaps in mechanisms, diagnostics and therapeutics of major human disease conditions which afflict large populations,” the A.I. unit’s founder, Paul Noble, said in a statement.

EYE ON A.I. TALENT

Salesforce hired Juan Perez to be the business software giant’s chief information officer and member of its executive leadership team. Perez was previously the CIO and engineering officer for UPS .

Xplorie picked Caleb Yaryan  to be the vacation rental company’s chief technology officer. Yaryan was previously senior product owner at the real estate company BoomTown .

Eventus Systems  chose Josh Bosquez  to be the financial services software company’s CTO. Bosquez was previously the CTO of Armor Cloud Security .

EYE ON A.I. RESEARCH

A.I.’s duel-use problem . Researchers from  Collaborations Pharmaceuticals , King’s College London , and the Swiss institute  Spiez Laboratory , published a paper in Nature  about how the same A.I. used to power drug discovery can be used for nefarious purposes like developing new biochemical weapons. The paper explains how easy it would be for researchers to use machine learning to design chemical warfare agents, which “should serve as a wake-up call for our colleagues in the ‘AI in drug discovery’ community. The paper is an example of A.I.’s duel-use problem, in which researchers fail to understand how the technology they create could be used in ways they do not expect.

From the paper:

For us, the genie is out of the medicine bottle when it comes to repurposing our machine learning. We must now ask: what are the implications? Our own commercial tools, as well as open-source software tools and many datasets that populate public databases, are available with no oversight. If the threat of harm, or actual harm, occurs with ties back to machine learning, what impact will this have on how this technology is perceived? Will hype in the press on AI-designed drugs suddenly flip to concern about AI-designed toxins, public shaming and decreased investment in these technologies? 

FORTUNE ON A.I.

Rivian’s lack of history is hurting its chances with chipmakers—leaving Amazon facing a $10 billion hit —By Christiaan Hetzner

Some 61% of women say online harassment is a problem. Google Jigsaw wants to give them back control —By Emma Hinchliffe

Why Stryker is going all in on A.I. in healthcare —By Susie Gharib

China’s tech hub Shenzhen locks down 17.5 million residents, closing Apple factories and risking chaos in global supply chain —By Eamon Barrett

Augmented reality specialist Magic Leap is back with a new headset as interest in the metaverse soars —By Jonathan Vanian

Deep skepticism about deep learning. A.I. expert Gary Marcus  wrote an opinion article for the science publication Nautilus  about the limitations of deep learning, in which researchers use neural network software to analyze data so they can adapt and make decisions. In recent years, Marcus has positioned himself as an A.I. contrarian who believes that deep learning, while a powerful tool, has been overhyped.

He wrote that deep learning is useful “when all we need are rough-ready results, where stakes are low and perfect results optional.” In other words, deep learning is good for teaching computers to recognize cats in photos, but it makes too many mistakes to be used in more high-stakes scenarios, like “radiology or driverless cars,” he writes. More powerful A.I. will include a variety of techniques as opposed to only deep learning, he believes.  

From the article:

Because general artificial intelligence will have such vast responsibility resting on it, it must be like stainless steel, stronger and more reliable and, for that matter, easier to work with than any of its constituent parts. No single AI approach will ever be enough on its own; we must master the art of putting diverse approaches together, if we are to have any hope at all. (Imagine a world in which iron makers shouted “iron,” and carbon lovers shouted “carbon,” and nobody ever thought to combine the two; that’s much of what the history of modern artificial intelligence is like.)

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Cruise’s driverless autonomous cars start giving rides to paying passengers

The era of commercial autonomous robotaxi service is here — Cruise officially became the first company to offer fared rides to the general public in a major city as of late Wednesday. The milestone comes after Cruise received official approval from the California Public Utilities Commission in early June to operate driverless in a commercial capacity .

Initially, Cruise’s driverless autonomous offering will operate only between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m., and only on designated streets in the city. But the limits are part of a plan by regulators and the company to prove out the safety and efficacy of its system before deploying it in more locations at additional times. The new operating window already extends its total active time by 1.5 hours as compared to the free driverless test pilot service it was offering between June of last year and the debut of this paid service.

UPDATE: As of last night, fared rides are now rolling out to our customers in SF. If you’re waiting to take your first driverless ride, we’re inviting more people into our AVs each week, so sit tight— it’ll be worth it! 😉 https://t.co/UpjuQ9K81W pic.twitter.com/CwkD1LftnV — cruise (@Cruise) June 23, 2022

It sounds like Cruise is still a ways off from making this offering available far and wide to San Franciscans eager to take a trip with a robot chauffeur, but this is still a major step toward a future where AVs crawl the streets in big cities picking up paying fares.

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Cruise is now testing fully driverless cars in San Francisco

The gm-backed company is one of the first to launch level 4 vehicles in a dense, complex urban setting.

By Andrew J. Hawkins , transportation editor with 10+ years of experience who covers EVs, public transportation, and aviation. His work has appeared in The New York Daily News and City & State.

Share this story

Cruise, the self-driving car company affiliated with General Motors and Honda, is testing fully driverless cars, without a human safety driver behind the steering wheel, in San Francisco. The company is among the first to test its driverless vehicles in a dense, complex urban environment.

“Getting to driverless in SF took more than five years of rigorous testing, over 2 million miles of driving in one of the craziest driving environments, together with hard work from a huge team of dedicated engineers and others across Cruise, as well as at GM,” Cruise CEO Dan Ammann said in a call with reporters. “And not to mention several billion dollars of investment along the way.”

To be sure, the vehicles are not completely alone in the wilderness. In a video released by the company, a Cruise employee is seen in the passenger seat while the car drives itself through the darkened streets of San Francisco. Cruise’s vehicles all have an emergency switch in the center channel near the gear shift in case something goes wrong, and they are also monitored remotely by Cruise employees. Asked whether remote operators are able to take control of the vehicle when needed, Ammann declined to answer.

“The safety operator has the ability to bring the vehicle to a stop in the event of an emergency, but does not have access to standard driver controls,” a spokesperson said. “Eventually, this safety operator will be fully removed.”

Cruise was approved to test fully driverless cars (also called Level 4 in industry parlance) in California on October 15th. According to the DMV, Cruise can only test five driverless vehicles “on specified streets within San Francisco.” The vehicles are not allowed to exceed 30 mph, and can’t operate during heavy fog or heavy rain.

Cruise was the fifth company to receive a driverless permit from the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles, the others being  Waymo ,  Nuro ,  Zoox , and AutoX. Currently, 60 companies have an active permit to test autonomous vehicles with a safety driver in California.

This is the first time that Cruise has demonstrated its Level 4 capabilities

This is the first time that Cruise has demonstrated its Level 4 capabilities. Its main rival, Google spinoff Waymo, has been testing its fully driverless vehicles in Phoenix for over a year, and recently announced it would be making its Level 4 taxi service available to more customers. Cruise doesn’t allow non-employees to ride in its vehicles. The company had planned to launch a commercial taxi service in 2019  but failed to do so , and it has yet to publicly commit to a new date.

Last year,  Cruise unveiled the Cruise Origin , a fully driverless prototype vehicle without a steering wheel, pedals, or any controls typically associated with human driving. The vehicle, which will go into production at GM’s Detroit-Hamtramck plant , is built to be shared by multiple passengers — though it remains to be seen how much appetite there is for shared vehicles in a post-COVID world. Cruise recently unveiled a new set of safety protocols intended to keep people socially distant during trips and the vehicle sanitized between fares.

The news that the company will be relying less on its operations staff during its testing comes after Cruise’s safety drivers have  complained about a lack of safety standards  during the pandemic and subsequent wildfires. They accuse Cruise of deploying its self-driving cars during the spring lockdown  in defiance of public health orders  banning nonessential travel. And they say Cruise isn’t doing enough to keep them safe during these public health crises.

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Ariya‘s grandmother recalls when the 10-month-old‘s body ’just looked lifeless' after she was left in hot car

Trial for babysitter accused in the child’s hot-car death started wednesday.

Erik Avanier , Reporter

BAKER COUNTY, Fla. – It was an emotional day in court for the family of the 10-month-old who was left in a hot car and died in the summer of 2023.

Wednesday was the start of the trial for 46-year-old Rhonda Jewell , who was accused of leaving Ariya unattended in an SUV for five hours in Macclenny.

Brook Paige, Ariya’s mother, described the moment after doctors at the Ed Frasier Memorial Hospital told her that her daughter died.

“I didn‘t know how to feel,” Paige said. “I didn’t know what to feel.”

Ariya’s family told News4JAX earlier this year that they hoped Jewell would take a plea deal to prevent them from reliving the horrific events of one of the hottest days in July 2023.

Paige also recounted what happened when she arrived to pick up Ariya, stating that Jewell ran to the SUV so she followed her.

When Paige got to the car, she said she saw her daughter not breathing as she sat in her car seat still strapped in.

“You said she was not breathing, how did you know that?“ the judge asked Paige. ”Her lips were blue," she replied.

The temperature reached more than 110 degrees that day. Paige was visibly emotional when she had to testify about finding her child unresponsive.

It was difficult for Paige to confirm evidence photos of her daughter.

Ariya’s grandmother, Pamela Paige, also took to the stand.

“I saw the rescue workers taking Aryia out of the ambulance and they were still doing CPR, and I could see Ariya. She just looked lifeless. One of the paramedics was crying so I knew it was a bad sign.”

The court also heard testimonies from other family members, a patrol deputy and a paramedic.

The trial will continue Thursday morning. It’s unclear if Jewell will testify in her defense.

Ariya‘s family pushed for the Ariya’s Act bill to recognize April as “Hot Car Prevention” month in Florida. It was unanimously passed and requires certain agencies and local governments to sponsor events that educate the community on the dangers of leaving children in hot cars.

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About the Author

Erik avanier.

Award-winning broadcast and multimedia journalist with 20 years experience.

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