General Motors‘ Cruise subsidiary says it will make an announcement on Tuesday, January 21st. While it’s not clear what the autonomous driving company is preparing to make public, a series of cryptic Instagram posts may provide some insight into its plans.
Cruise completely wiped its Instagram of all its previous posts and put up eight new photographs – all of which featured GPS co-ordinates. Plugging the coordinates into Google Maps yields some interesting results. The photograph with the beam of light, located in the center of the thumbnail spread (pictured below), is where the debut event for whatever Cruise has planned will take place. The relevance of the other locations is a bit less obvious, though.
The lop left photo includes coordinates for an industrial district in Xinmi, Zhengzhou, Henan, China, which is believed to be close to the location of where the first compass was created. The top center photo, meanwhile is for the Welsh town of Merthyr Tydfil, home to the first successful locomotive demonstration. The third location is of the Karl Benz museum, who was the inventor of the first-ever motorcar, of course.
Moving onto the second row, we see coordinates for the Thomas Edison Museum in Menlo Park, New Jersey, which is where Edison first invented the lightbulb and developed other famous inventions of his. The photo on the far right of the second row shows the latitude and longitude for the Foundation Guglielmo Marconi in Italy – who was the original inventor of the radio.
Foundation Guglielmo Marconi in Italy (via Google maps)
The far left bottom row coordinates are for the Kleinrock Internet History Center at the University of California Los Angeles, which is where the internet was invented, while the center coordinates are for the Palo Alto Research Center, where the computer mouse, ethernet and a number of other important inventions were created. The final set is for the New York Midtown Hilton, which is where the first handheld cellular phone call was made from in the 1970s.
So what do all these co-ordinates have in common? Well, they are almost all tied to world-changing technologies. From the invention of the compass, to the advent of the radio and the development of the internet, these locations were the birthplace of technologies that have helped to make the world what it is today. Cruise seems to think that its announcement, whatever that may be, will one day be viewed as being similarly important to the arrival of the compass, radio and internet.
Dan Ammann (far right) with Cruise executives Dan Kan and Kyle Vogt
Cruise had previously planned to launch a fully autonomous taxi service before the end of 2019, but delayed the launch after hitting some snags in the self-driving vehicle’s development. It seems likely Cruise may now be ready to launch its driverless taxicab service, then, which it hopes will one day be the autonomous equivalent to Uber or Lyft.
Stay tuned for full details on Cruise’s announcement as soon as they become available and be sure to subscribe to GM Authority for more Cruise news and around-the-clock GM news coverage.
Comments
Could it be that they will split from GM and maybe go Public?
We can only hope…….
Did anyone tell these folks that the interest in these drones is waning? Another non value added dog and pony show.
@Tigger
I hate to be the one to burst your bubble but Autonomous might be worth more than some Auto Makers.
Companies aren’t spending Billions on it just for Fun.
Cruise could potentially be worth more money than GM if they ever split it and have it go Public.
as of today, nobody buys that. gm’s market cap today is basically the same as it was 10 years ago before gm bought cruise.
if this is indeed an ipo announcement, i interpret that as gm cashing out their investment. maybe not a bad idea with the stock market at all-time highs. but wall street doesn’t seem to have much appetite for money losing unicorns. AVs are a money pit with no revenue in sight so an ipo is just a means to raise money.
i first thought this announcement will be about deployment in a very controlled environment. if you really think they are ready to unleash this robo taxi army on public roads, load up on gm shares.
I agree with everything you said except to buy GM shares if they unload an army of these robo taxis on the streets. I feel that it is a disaster waiting to happen. Much like the X-Car and diesel engines of GM’s past, they have a poor track record of rushing things to the public just to be first with something.
The tech sector has always had a reputation of overpromising and underdelivering. The billions wasted by GM on this venture has given the everyday buyer a bland lineup (with the exception of the Corvette), a watered down Cadillac lineup, and recycled interiors for the new trucks. At least if you are spending all of this money on this technology, make the Cruise vehicle look something less ugly than a cockroach.
Hey GM, what about announcing the EV cars you promised long ago?
Hey GM, It is about time to design a nice style Cruise automobile. Before you go into mass builds, PLEASE design a better-looking auto.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/21/gm-subsidiary-cruise-unveils-its-first-purpose-built-autonomous-vehicle.html
Good post. I’m going through many of these issues as well..