GM kills Cruise

General Motors has stopped funding the development of self-driving robotaxis from Cruise. The Detroit-based car manufacturer announced this in a press release today. Instead, GM wants to concentrate on the further development of the Super Cruise driver assistance system.

GM will build on the progress of Super Cruise, the company’s hands-off, eyes-on driving feature, now offered on more than 20 GM vehicle models and currently logging over 10 million miles per month.

GM intends to combine the majority-owned Cruise LLC and GM technical teams into a single effort to advance autonomous and assisted driving.

The reason given by GM is that “given the considerable time and resources that would be needed to scale the business, along with an increasingly competitive robotaxi market“, this is no longer in line with GM’s priorities.

Cruise Automation, founded in 2013 by Kyle Vogt and Dan Vogt and sold to GM for over a billion dollars in 2016, was one of the first operators of a driverless robotaxi fleet in San Francisco and other cities in the USA alongside Waymo. Several hundred vehicles have been on the road in San Francisco since August 2023, which were allowed to drive driverless in commercial operation with passengers.

Ich selbst habe dabei etwa 130 Fahrten unternommen und an mehreren Stellen berichtet.

In October, there was an incident with a pedestrian, through no fault of Cruise’s own, who got stuck under the Cruise and was dragged along (here is the exact course of the accident). The management’s subsequent mistakes in cooperating with the authorities led to the suspension of the license. The company was restructured and the management was taken over by experienced car managers from Detroit, who brought with them a completely different mindset. The head start gained by Waymo, which is rapidly expanding its robotaxi operations, and the difficulties at GM, which is unable to convert its production to electric cars and is struggling with sales problems, have now dealt Cruise the death blow.

After electric cars, GM is also scaling back its ambitions for the second wave of automotive disruption – autonomous driving. They are drawing similar conclusions to Ford and Volkswagen, who killed their own self-driving division Argo last year, even after investing 3.5 billion dollars. Instead, all manufacturers are now focusing on developing better driver assistance systems in the hope that they will also enable autonomous driving. But going from developing the better candle to the light bulb is not a walkable path. It’s like taking a ladder to the moon.

This article was also published in German.