Following an injury accident in October of 2023 involving one of its autonomous vehicles (AV), General Motors implemented a major shift to its AV strategy, slashing the budget for its AV tech division, Cruise, while cutting staff and reshuffling executives in a sweeping restructuring effort. GM also pushed back the launch of Cruise Origin, the company’s fully autonomous shuttles, with several newly minted Cruise Origin units spotted on their way to a defunct GM facility last March. Now, nearly two dozen Cruise Origin units have been spotted in storage at the GM Milford Proving Ground.
Images captured at the facility show roughly 20 units of the Cruise Origin parked side-by-side on a grassy strip on facility grounds. It’s unclear if these are the same units that were hauled over to the defunct GM Gran Blanc tooling center in March, or a different set of units.
“With the rescaling and retiming of Cruise’s operations we will not be deploying Origins this year,” a Cruise spokesperson explained after units were spotted on their way to the GM Grand Blanc Tooling Center in March. “They are being stored at GM’s facility in Grand Blanc as there is not enough space at Factory Zero. These vehicles will be used for future AV engineering, development, manufacturing and education.”
Production of the Cruise Origin at the GM Factory Zero plant in Michigan was halted in November following an injury accident in San Francisco the preceding October. The accident resulted in a pedestrian becoming trapped under a Cruise AV test vehicle after the pedestrian was initially struck and thrown by an adjacent human-driven vehicle. In response, GM moved to rebuild public trust in AV technology, in addition to pausing Cruise’s AV testing efforts across the country. In July, GM CEO and Chair Mary Barra confirmed that deployment of the Cruise Origin robotaxi was paused indefinitely in light of regulatory uncertainty and higher-than-expected per-unit costs, with Cruise turning to the next-generation Chevy Bolt EV with regard to the future implementation of new AV technology.
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Hey…give them a little credit.
Each of them parked there all on their own.
Ironic that they are parked at the end of a test road that was closed for normal testing 35 years ago because it became to dangerous. Guessing the proving grounds management figures these fit right in there.
To the scrap yard they go……
How many billions of dollars were wasted designing, engineering, developing, and manufacturing these useless vehicles?
And who took accountability within GM?
Imagine if all those resources were spent on vehicles people actually want to purchase (besides full-size SUVs, pickups, and Corvettes)!
Not mentioned is the fact that NHTSA and DOT never responded to GM’s application for exemption to produce and operate a vehicle without a steering wheel and manual driver’s controls.
This pause is more about that, I bet.
Correct--these require considerable exemptions from NHTSA to operate on public roads. GM took a huge gamble to build these expecting to get exemptions, which they didn't get. They can be used on tightly controlled geo-fenced routes with NHTSA approval, but that will never prove to take full advantage of these very expensive units.
Good place for them
Are these not the goofiest looking pieces of crap ? An embarrassment to be seen in !
Are you embarrassed to be seen in an airport shuttle? Or bus?
Get a grip.
As many wrote in the past, these were the unicorns being chased by Mary. The last figure of the expense on these (I believe last year was around $1B) it goes to the forgotten books and pretty sure no one will be held accountable.
The situation that suspended the Cruise robo taxi service was unique and impossible to have avoided. Human piloted car caused an accident and as the autonomous vehicle was programmed to yield to emergency vehicles responding to the accident, the taxi pulled over and failed to see the hurt pedestrian. The vehicles in development are being held to a standard, human piloted vehicles are not. I think the idea has merit and is only paused, not abandoned. Right now, they are just a bit ahead of their time and software programmers ability to predict every possible scenario. Legislation must also evolve to accommodate future developments, right now congress is only busy saving us from washing machines and dishwashers, and are not ready to do more than that. Machine learning is a visionary endeavor, I applaud their efforts.
Yeah, it’s kind of terrible that no one ever reports on the human driver that caused that accident. Are they still driving? Are they getting sued? Did they get their license suspended?
Mary and her love of EV's is going to bankrupt GM for the 2nd time. She needs to go along with many others. GM needs car people running GM.
I think it’s a shame the feds never approved their application for exemption from the need for a steering wheel and pedals.
This small bus like shuttles are the way to do AV.