General Motors is pointing at time, resources and competition as the reasons it has decided to pull the plug on the development of the Cruise self-driving taxi.
As GM owns 90% of the company, the decision will likely push Cruise to collapse, reflecting the automotive giant’s wider strategy of scaling back its electric vehicle ambitions.
GM is now going to “refocus [its] autonomous driving development on personal vehicles”, it said, leaving Tesla and Waymo to vie for pole position in the robotaxi race.
GM Cuts Costs by Crashing Cruise
General Motors has invested more than $10 billion in Cruise and its autonomous vehicles since 2016, but recently, the costs have gotten too high.
There was a sign of a shift to come earlier this month when GM sold its stake in its joint venture battery plant in Michigan to its partner LG Energy Solution.
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However, the Detroit-based car company announced in a statement published this week that it has decided to no longer fund work on the self-driving robotaxis, “given the considerable time and resources that would be needed to scale the business, along with an increasingly competitive robotaxi market.”
Instead, it will concentrate on autonomous personal vehicles and “its profitable business of making gasoline-powered pickup trucks and other large vehicles,” Reuters reports.
GM will fold Cruise’s business into its group focusing on driver assistance technology but has not said how much of the workforce it will retain. GM says this restructuring will save the company more than $1 billion annually.
Writing Already on The Wall
Cruise already slashed a quarter of its workforce – 900 jobs – in December last year. This was after GM decided to stop developing a robotaxi that had no steering wheel or human controls.
The decision to cease production was made after a Cruise robotaxi struck and injured a pedestrian in San Francisco in October 2023. GM ended up paying a substantial settlement to the injured person.
However, there was more grief for Cruise when it was accused of submitting a false report to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to try to influence the investigation into the crash. In particular, the report pointed out that the pedestrian had been dragged more than 20ft (6m) by the vehicle.
Cruise was hit with a $500,000 criminal fine, and Cruise co-founder Kyle Vogt left the company in disgrace. Vogt has been disparaging of GM’s decision to cut funding, taking to X to declare that “GM are a bunch of dummies.”
Who Remains in the Robotaxi Race?
Cruise is now in the pit, and Ford and Volkswagen retired their self-driving car joint venture, Argo AI, from the race back in 2022. There are now only a handful of contenders jostling for road space.
Elon Musk unveiled his Cybercab in October to much fanfare (and then much grumbling from the film industry that he had stolen their ideas). The CEO of Tesla says that the robotaxi fleet could be on the roads “before 2027” but he is, by his own admittance, “optimistic with timeframes” and has been talking about this fleet since 2016.
A strong competitor – and ahead in the race – is Google-backed Waymo, which has around 700 vehicles on the roads in the US.
Baidu is also making headway into this market but a Biden ban on Chinese self-driving vehicle software will put a block to its plans in the US.
So, while there are businesses out there pursuing promising projects, they’re all several years away from having the kind of robotaxi fleet that would let you stake a claim to total market supremacy. Cruise’s ride, however, has well and truly come to an end.
