When Toyota Came to GM, Robot Axis Did Not Interact with Fire Trucks, As A Business As It Has Been Formed

When it finishes acquiring the remaining shares, GM anticipates achieving cost savings of $1 billion annually, GM chief financial officer Paul Jacobson said.

But even as other automakers cut their losses, Barra doubled down. In 2022, she took the stage at the annual Consumer Electronics Show and boldly declared that GM would sell fully autonomous vehicles to regular people by the middle of the decade. It seems unlikely the company will be able to meet that deadline. And while investors have encouraged GM to cut their losses with Cruise, she has stuck by the project. The reorganization of Cruise has taken place over the last 12 months, with the removal of its founding family and the appointment of auto and tech industry veterans.

But Cruise moved too aggressively, and it paid the price. The company had more than five million miles of real world testing, but it was starting to get embarrassing. In San Francisco it was blocking traffic or running into emergency vehicles. The city’s fire chief said that the vehicles were “not ready for prime time,” citing over six dozen incidents in which robotaxis interfered with fire trucks.

The company said it would leave robotaxis due to the amount of time and resources needed to scale the business.

“Given the considerable time and expense required to scale a robotaxi business in an increasingly competitive market, combining forces would be more efficient and therefore consistent with our capital allocation priorities,” Barra said on the call.

Full-Self-Driven Super Cruise: Where Do We Go From Here? When GM will focus on the next-generation autonomous automaker

Instead, the Detroit automaker will focus on development of partially automated driver-assist systems for personal vehicles like its Super Cruise, which allows drivers to take their hands off the steering wheel.

Eventually, GM intends to sell “level 4” vehicles to car buyers, which can drive completely autonomously on some but not all roads. People love to drive their own vehicles but not all the time.

General Motors owns 90 percent of Cruise and says it has reached an agreement with other shareholders to own more than 97 percent of the firm. GM will “restructure and refocus” Cruise as part of the effort, but Barra could not say whether the new arrangement would lead to layoffs.

Dave Richardson, senior vice president of software and services engineering, said Cruise will bring its software, artificial intelligence and sensor development to GM to team up on improving GM’s driver-assist systems.

The service is available in Phoenix, San Francisco and Los Angeles. The company said last week that it would begin testing its self-sufficient Jaguar in Miami next year, with the plan to charge for rides in six years’ time.

Automakers are tapping out of the robotaxi business. With all the money being spent on electric vehicles, the auto industry has decided to cut its losses. Only one transformational, prohibitively expensive, once-in-a-generation shift at a time.

An investigation by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration into Full Self- Driving’s abilities to see in low visibility casts doubts on whether the technology is ready for use without humans behind the wheel.

The same thing happened a couple of years ago when Ford pulled funding for the startup, which had been financed by the company. It cited as one of its reasons a belief that partial autonomy — often described as Level 3 or Level 3-plus — will have more near-term payoffs.

Over the years GM invested billions in the subsidiary and eventually bought 90% of the company from investors, all while racking up millions in losses.

The Case of a Lossful Accident: Driverless Vehicles and Robotic Highways in the Era of Urban Safety Measures, Incidentally Dropped by a Pedestrian

To be sure, there’s been a lot of technological progress. Not too long ago, Cruise had driverless cars ferrying passengers across San Francisco. The company even said it was on the cusp of winning government approval to deploy its steering wheel- and pedal-less Origin shuttles in a bid to move even more people.

It all culminated in an incident on October 7th, 2023, when a Cruise vehicle in San Francisco struck and dragged a pedestrian over 20 feet, seriously injuring her. A hit-and-run driver then launched the victim into the path of the Cruise car.

But more importantly, the incident damaged Cruise’s effort to win the public’s trust. San Francisco residents were very angry with the company’s cars bumping into emergency vehicles at an alarming rate. Urbanists and supporters of car-free transportation were peeved at the suggestion that robot cars, and not fewer cars altogether, were what was needed to improve street safety. Regulators found out about a dangerous incident when they were misled.

“Total ownership by a century old manufacturing giant controlled by stock buyback-seeking value investors was never going to be successful,” Ray Wert, former communications director at Cruise, said on Bluesky.

Driver-assistance technologies, especially so-called Level 3 systems, carry their own risks. There have been studies that show that the handoff between a partially automated system and a human driver can be especially fraught.

When people are not driving for a longer period, they may get into a bad situation that causes them to act irrationally. They may be unable to respond correctly because they haven’t been paying attention. And those actions can create a domino effect that has the potential to be dangerous — perhaps even fatal.