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While the world’s richest man is going all in with a robotaxi, General Motors has decided to pull the plug on its embryonic autonomous taxis. GM has announced that it will stop shoveling money into Cruise, the robotaxi subsidiary that never managed to make a dime. Instead of taxis, GM plans to focus on autonomous driving for personal vehicles.
GM acquired Cruise in 2016 for $1 billion, hoping to build a fleet of self-driving cars that could earn money driving people around cities. GM spent heavily to develop self-driving technology for Cruise, which cost GM about $10 billion in the intervening eight years. Now, GM says it cannot continue to justify the expenditures. What it has spent so far would be a drop in the bucket if it had attempted to scale Cruise up to make it a viable business, and it’s not willing to make that investment with increasing competition in the industry.
The Cruise team isn’t getting the axe—at least some of them will be absorbed into other teams working to build driver assist features. “The best way to do [self-driving] is with a singular strategy that prioritizes the incremental delivery of autonomous capabilities,” said GM senior VP Dave Richardson in a call with reporters.
GM will continue developing its hands-free driving system, Super Cruise. Cruise and GM co-developed this technology, but the company will now focus on implementing features in personal vehicles. The hope is to push toward a fully autonomous “eyes-off” system, but that may still be years away.
LIDAR gave Cruise vehicles an accurate map of objects in real-time.
Credit: GM
Cruise robotaxis had onboard LIDAR scanners, allowing them to see the environment in real time, but consumer vehicles don’t have these expensive sensor modules. Current Super Cruise systems rely on pre-loaded LIDAR maps, radar, cameras, and GPS to navigate. Going by the SAE automation definitions, Super Cruise is a level 2 system, similar to Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD). If it can develop something that does not require constant human oversight, that would be SAE level 3. Waymo robotaxis are considered to have level 4 autonomy, but they also have expensive LIDAR systems.
The elephant in the room is Elon Musk, who has promised a fleet of self-driving robotaxis once the company puts the finishing touches on the Cybercab. That vehicle has no steering wheel, but neither does it have LIDAR. For this design to make sense, Tesla FSD would need to quickly advance to level 5 autonomy. Musk claims the vehicle will cost about $30,000 and rely on camera-based navigation like the company’s other vehicles. The stakes are high for Tesla, which has been making big promises about FSD for years. Musk and Co won’t have to worry about competing with GM in the robotaxis, though.