"Refute" means "To prove something to be false or incorrect."
This headline is abusing a proscribed meaning of "refute": "To deny the truth or correctness of something."
Cruise has offered no evidence but only a press release in which they make counterclaims. To be fair, SFFD didn't really provide any evidence in their claims, either. So this is simply "he said, she said" until there is concrete sensor evidence to the contrary.
Overall, it is shoddy writing. A pet peeve of mine is on display:
"The victim suffered critical injuries but died after reaching the hospital."
The use of "but" here is confusing. It's the wrong conjunction. The author meant "and," as if to say "there were critical injuries and the outcome you expected was what happened," rather than "there were critical injuries, and contrary to what you would expect to have happened, what you expected to have happened did indeed happen."
“Cruise showed KRON4 footage from the night of the incident to explain its side of the story. Due to Cruise company policy, the footage was not released for public consumption.”
Cruise did provide video evidence, mentioned in this article, though the contents were not described. A NY Times article on the same subject described the content of the video here (gift link):https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/02/technology/driverless-car...
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/refute
"Refute" means "To prove something to be false or incorrect."
This headline is abusing a proscribed meaning of "refute": "To deny the truth or correctness of something."
Cruise has offered no evidence but only a press release in which they make counterclaims. To be fair, SFFD didn't really provide any evidence in their claims, either. So this is simply "he said, she said" until there is concrete sensor evidence to the contrary.