- General Motors will no longer fund Cruise.
- GM says launching and maintaining a Robotaxi network is not something that it is interested in doing.
- The automaker intends to roll Cruise’s commercial tech into its vision for “Personal Autonomy.”
After a staggering $10 billion investment, General Motors is officially hitting the brakes on Cruise.
The automaker’s once-ambitious foray into the world of robotaxis has caused the automaker more than a few headaches—both financial and legal. And at a time when GM is more mindful of costs than ever, Cruise will be one of the first branches CEO Mary Barra lops off to save the tree.
“The amount of money to deploy a robotaxi business and then to maintain that business and grow it, it’s quite a bit of capital,” said CEO Mary Barra during a media call on Tuesday. “A robotaxi business is not General Motors’ core business.”
Instead, Barra said, GM’s automated driving efforts will focus on the consumer side of things, meaning increasingly automated and driverless cars instead of a robotaxi service.
David Richardson, GM’s Senior Vice President of Software and Services, acknowledged that pursuing one path to autonomy is “way more efficient” and that augmenting Super Cruise with the technologies developed by Cruise will drive more returns than operating a robotaxi network.
Cruise’s plans to roll out robotaxis nationwide might be over, but its technology and talent won’t go to waste. GM says that it plans to roll Cruise’s advances into what it’s calling “Personal Autonomy”—the kind that you or I have access to in our personal vehicles. Think of a more advanced version of GM’s Super Cruise with the final technical destination being Level 3 and Level 4 autonomy.
Sure, that’s not the same thing as hopping in the back seat of a Cruise-branded Chevy Bolt and being chauffeured completely autonomously, but GM says that’s not what folks want all of the time, anyway: they want to drive
“We know people everywhere love to drive their own vehicles, but not in every situation,” Barra said. She later continued: “The opportunity to deliver these benefits to our customers that they’ll use every day is very exciting for us, and that is our core business,” said Barra.
This is a breaking news post. It will be updated.
