Just yesterday, GM Authority reported that General Motors had elected to indefinitely pause the deployment of its fully autonomous Cruise Origin robotaxi. With that in mind, Cruise Founder and former CEO Kyle Vogt took to social media to criticize the Detroit-based automaker over this decision.
As GM Chair and CEO Mary Barra stated during The General’s Q2 2024 earnings report, development of the Origin will be put on ice due to regulatory uncertainty and higher per-unit costs. Moving forward, the self-driving subsidiary will utilize the next-gen Chevy Bolt EV to implement its AV technology.
Kyle Vogt (middle)
“Disappointed to see GM kill the Origin,” Former Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt remarked. “Would have been amazing for cities. GM repeatedly finds themselves with a five-ten year head start, but then fumbles the ball, shuts things down, and loses the lead. Anyone remember the EV1? It’s like someone keeps letting them look into a crystal ball and then they just go, ‘nah, we’re good’.”
It’s worth noting that Vogt decided to resign as Cruise CEO following the October 2023 incident, and has since co-founded a new robotics company.
Disappointed to see GM kill the Origin. Would have been amazing for cities.
GM repeatedly finds themselves with a 5-10 year head start, but then fumbles the ball, shuts things down, and loses the lead. Anyone remember the EV1?
It’s like someone keeps letting them look into a… pic.twitter.com/GDlL4KQk4S
— Kyle Vogt (@kvogt) July 23, 2024
In other Cruise-related developments, the robotaxi company recently announced that it had launched the Emergency Responder Advisory Council, a panel of experts Cruise’s internal teams can consult with in order to improve upon its AV product development, along with incident and safety processes. Thus far, Cruise claims to have engaged with as many as 600 responders through in-person training sessions.
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Comments
Kyle seems like your typical bitter Silicon Valley tech bro who thinks he knows better than everyone else including state regulators who rightly called Origin out for using city roads as testing grounds before the tech was ready.
The company is lucky the vehicle didn’t kill that pedestrian who was injured.
Spoken like a litigation-happy beurocrat… His commentarty seemed pretty spot on to me, the problem with GM goes back WAY father than the EV1.
Why did he get in bed with GM then?
Remember, this is the guy who was fired from GM for failure to report an accident involving a pedestrian and an experimental vehicle.
Never offered a diesel, hence it failed.
Give it a rest. Cruise isn’t even ready for GM to manufacture these little failure machines because their tech isn’t ready or approved for revenue ride shares yet. Neither is Zoox, who has still failed to earn a single dollar, start production, or move a single revenue passenger.
Autonomous ride shares have been over hyped and have failed to meet pretty much every one of their goals for years. Without a method to earn licensing revenue before the tech is fully baked, there was no way to keep these pretend companies going.
Conpanies like Cruise, Waymo, and Zoox are fundamentally flawed at best. They are just more Silicon Valley lies at worst.
He’s no longer with GM because he was deemed incompetent so he should keep his thoughts to himself.
Its a free country, he can speak his mind, Though I do not know enough about the market and the technology to agree or disagree with him.
The Origin was not in a leading position by any means–other shuttles were available well before the Origin which was never available. I’m amazed GM even went into production when it had no chance of ever meeting FMVSS requirements at the time.
I’m guessing GM thought it could get exemptions based strictly on its clout and perceived influence over NHTSA. Well, it didn”t work and now they have useless shuttles that can only be deployed on private property. I’m guessing these things cost GM upward of $400k apiece to build.
They can be used for dumpsters.
Ok now they can concentrate on that flying Cadillac passenger drone.