- General Motors will no longer fund Cruise, its majority-owned self-driving car division
- Instead, it will move forward with further development of its Super Cruise hands-free system
- Cruise’s work will be merged into GM’s internal assisted-driving tech team
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General Motors isn’t abandoning the idea of self-driving cars, but if you want one, you’ll have to buy it, not hail it. The automaker is defunding its Cruise “robotaxi” development work, and merging it into its internal assisted-driving technology team. Instead of self-driving cabs, GM plans to simply move forward with its Super Cruise, its hands-free driving assist system that works on some 352,000 kilometres (218,000 miles) of pre-mapped highways in Canada and the U.S.
Cruise was an independent start-up, founded in San Francisco in 2013 to develop and test autonomous-vehicle technology. General Motors was on a roll when it acquired a majority interest in 2016; that year, it also formed a brand called Maven that would cover car-sharing fleets, and entered in to a strategic alliance with ride-hailing company Lyft.
GM also formed an internal Autonomous Vehicle Development Team, and Cruise operated as an independent unit within it. The original Cruise vehicle was built on the all-electric Chevrolet Bolt. In 2018, Honda acquired a stake in Cruise, and the two automakers planned to build the Cruise Origin together. It was a loaf-shaped, bus-style van that wouldn’t have a steering wheel.
But the Cruise project didn’t exactly cruise along. One of its cars crashed in 2022 in San Francisco, injuring two people; and later that year, after three other drivers banged into Cruise cars that apparently braked for no reason, the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) opened a probe into the incidents. In 2023, a driver struck a pedestrian and pushed her into the path of a Cruise, which continued to drag her and causing serious injuries.
Following that, California shut down Cruise’s no-driver taxis, and Cruise voluntarily took its cars off the road in other cities. In June of 2024, it said it was going back on the road in Phoenix, Houston, and Dallas – California hadn’t lifted its ban – but with “safety” drivers behind the wheel. A month later, citing the difficulty of meeting regulations with a vehicle that lacked driver controls, as well as how much the vehicle would ultimately cost to build, General Motors and Honda announced they’d abandoned the Cruise Origin project.
In August 2024, GM announced a multi-year partnership with Uber. Under it, GM would eventually make driverless Cruise vehicles available on the ride-hailing app. Those cars would be based on the all-new and still-to-come Chevrolet Bolt, but today’s news has driven a nail in that coffin.
GM owns about 90% of Cruise, and said that in agreement with other shareholders, it will raise that to above 97% and then work with the Cruise team “to restructure and refocus Cruise’s operations.” The automaker estimates the restructuring will reduce its annual spending by US$1 billion once the plan is completed, likely in the first half of 2025.
Instead, the Cruise and GM technical teams will be combined “into a single effort to advance autonomous and assisted driving.” It’s getting out of the Cruise robotaxi plan “given the considerable time and resources that would be needed to scale the business, along with an increasingly competitive robotaxi market.”
That market would include companies like Waymo, which already operates driverless ride-hailing vehicles in some cities; and of course Tesla, which recently unveiled a vehicle that Elon Musk said would come without steering wheel and pedals, cost just US$30,000, and be picking up passengers by 2026 or so. One of the big questions is exactly how it would do that: While Waymo and most other self-driving cars use lidar, Musk claims his robotaxi will do it much cheaper with an apparently-yet-untested combination of cameras and artificial intelligence.
But there are rumours afoot in the wake of a recent autonomous-driving event in early December for Tesla investors. Not only are there floating whispers about a new model that would be about 15% smaller than a Model 3 and be priced under that magic US$30,000 number – a Model 3 starts at US$42,490 – but there’s more to that no-steering-wheel robotaxi. News agency Reuters reports that investor Deutsche Bank said in a note that, “Tesla believes it would be reasonable to assume some type of tele-operator would be needed at least initially for safety/redundancy purposes.” It appears that US$30,000 price tag may have to factor in a steering wheel and pedals after all.
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