Cruise grew quickly and angered regulators. Now it has to do with the consequences.

Two months ago, Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt choked up when talking about how a driver should work killed a 4-year-old girl in a stroller at an intersection in San Francisco. “It barely made the news,” he said, pausing to collect himself. “Sorry. It makes me emotional.”

To make streets safer, he said in an interview, cities must embrace self-driving cars such as those designed by Cruise, a subsidiary of General Motors. They don’t get distracted, sleepy or drunk, he said, and because they were programmed to put safety first, they were able to significantly reduce the number of car-related deaths.

Now Mr. Vogt’s self-driving car company is facing safety problems of its own as he contends with angry regulators, concerned employees and skepticism about his management and the viability of a company he has often said will save lives and billions of dollars will generate.

On October 2, a car struck a woman at an intersection in San Francisco, throwing her into the path of one of Cruise’s self-driving taxis. The Cruise car ran over her, stopped briefly and then dragged her for about twenty feet before driving to the curb, causing serious injuries.

The California Department of Motor Vehicles last week accused Cruise of omitting the woman who was towed from a video of the incident that it initially provided to the agency. The DMV said the company “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 its self-driving operations nationwide, taking about 400 self-driving 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 investigation into the crash, said two people who attended a companywide meeting at Cruise on Monday.

Cruise employees worry there is no easy way to solve the company’s problems, five former and current employees and business partners said, while rivals fear Cruise’s problems could lead to stricter self-driving car regulations for them all.

Company insiders blame what went wrong on the technology sector’s culture – led by 38-year-old Mr Vogt – which prioritized speed over security. In the competition between Cruise and its biggest rival, driverless Waymo, Mr. Vogt wanted to dominate in the same way Uber dominated its smaller rival, Lyft.

“Kyle is a man who is willing to take risks and act quickly. He is truly Silicon Valley,” said Matthew Wansley, a professor at the Cardozo School of Law in New York who specializes in emerging automotive technologies. “That explains both Cruise’s success and his mistakes.”

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

He acknowledged that Cruise had lost the public’s trust, the aides said, and outlined a plan to regain it by being more transparent and placing 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 only 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. GM said in a statement that its “commitment to Cruise for the purpose of commercialization remains steadfast.” It said it believed in the company’s mission and technology and supported its moves to put safety first.

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

In 2013 he started Cruise Automation. The company has retrofitted conventional cars with sensors and computers to drive autonomously on highways. He sold the company to GM three years later for $1 billion.

After the deal closed, GM President Dan Ammann took over as CEO of Cruise and Mr. Vogt became its president and chief technology officer.

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

In 2021, Mr. Vogt took over as CEO. GM CEO Mary T. Barra began including Mr. Vogt in earnings calls and presentations, where he hyped the self-driving car market and predicted that Cruise would have a million cars by 2030.

Mr. Vogt pushed his company to continue its aggressive expansion, learning from the problems the cars encountered while operating 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 While driving in a bus lane last summer, some people at the company suggested temporarily allowing their vehicles to avoid streets with bus lanes, former employees said. But Mr. Vogt vetoed that idea, saying Cruise’s vehicles would have to continue driving those streets to master its 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 responding to an emergency. The company afterwards 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 than collision details, including documentation of unscheduled stops, traffic violations and vehicle performance, said Aaron Peskin, chairman of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.

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

With operations frozen, there are concerns that Cruise will become too much of a financial burden for GM and damage the auto giant’s reputation. Ms. Barra told investors that Cruise had “tremendous opportunity to grow” just hours before the D.MV in California. told Cruise to end its driverless operations.

Cruise hasn’t collected fares or passengers from ferries in more than a week. Hundreds of white and orange Cruise Chevrolet Bolts are stationary in San Francisco, Phoenix, Dallas, Houston, Miami and Austin, Texas. The closure complicates Cruise’s ambition to reach its goal of $1 billion in revenues by 2025.

GM spent an average of $588 million per quarter on Cruise last year, a 42 percent increase from a year ago. Each Chevrolet Bolt 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 driverless operations were halted. These vehicles were supported by an extensive operational staff, with 1.5 workers per vehicle. Workers responded every 3 to 5 miles to assist the company’s vehicles, two people familiar with the operations said. In other words, they often had to do something to control a car remotely after receiving a cell signal that there was trouble.

To cover rising costs, GM will have to inject or raise more money for the company, said Chris McNally, a financial analyst at Evercore ISI. On a call with analysts in late October, Ms. Barra said GM would share its financing plans before the end of the year.