As we reported on Tuesday, GM is dropping Cruise robotaxi efforts and refocusing on autonomy in personal vehicles. The move is expected to reduce GM’s spending by more than $1 billion annually, and it’s already invested over $10 billion into Cruise.
Since it was such a drain on the company’s balance sheet, it’s not hard to see why GM is dropping Cruise. However, Cruise’s co-founder Kyle Vogt had some strong words for The General on X. “In case it was unclear before, it is clear now: GM are a bunch of dummies,” Vogt said in an X post, which attracted a laughing emoji reply from Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who has big robotaxi plans of his own.
In case it was unclear before, it is clear now: GM are a bunch of dummies.
— Kyle Vogt (@kvogt) December 10, 2024
Investor Bradford Ferguson reposted Vogt’s post on X with some commentary of his own. Ferguson agrees that GM is dumb, but for different reasons than Vogt. “Cruise lied to regulators not only about The Accident but also about remote operators intervening frequently. This was also likely kept from GM,” Ferguson said. “Now you’re calling GM dumb? Yeah, they are dumb, their due diligence is terrible. They should have never partnered with you or Cruise.”
Cruise lied to regulators not only about The Accident but also about remote operators intervening frequently. This was also likely kept from GM
Now you’re calling GM dumb? Yeah, they are dumb, their due diligence is terrible. They should have never partnered with you or Cruise.… https://t.co/G7RbwT0yOr
— Bradford Ferguson (@bradsferguson) December 11, 2024
“GM is committed to delivering the best driving experiences to our customers in a disciplined and capital efficient manner,” said GM CEO Mary Barra of the company’s decision. “Cruise has been an early innovator in autonomy, and the deeper integration of our teams, paired with GM’s strong brands, scale, and manufacturing strength, will help advance our vision for the future of transportation.”
During a conference call with the media, General Motors stated that pursuing the robotaxi business was unsustainable “given the considerable time and resources that would be needed to scale the business, along with an increasingly competitive robotaxi market.”
As GM Authority reported in July, General Motors has indefinitely paused production of the Origin robotaxi. In September, a fleet of Origin robotaxis was spotted in storage at the Milford Proving Ground.
GM currently offers its Super Cruise semi-autonomous driver assist system on over 20 models, logging over 10 million miles every month.
Comments
As far as I’m concerned, a guy who can’t make a car pittle around town is probably a bigger dummy than GM for pulling the plug on an unwanted and unsuccessful venture.
lol, this is just silly. “Pittling around town” is a generation-defining challenge with a trillion dollar upside, but sure, you’d solve it.
It sounds like Cruise was nowhere near profitability and GM smartly decided to jettison them. I never thought robot taxis was a good idea. Imagine entering a robot taxi only to discover that the last guy vomited all over the place in a drunken stupor. Who’s going to clean it up? Not the robot.
But autonomous driving in personal vehicles is different. That’s got potential. GM should take the annual expenses dedicated to Cruise and throw it into beefing up Supercruise. That’s the way forward.
And…if you vomit in your own vehicle, you know what you’re doing the next day!
Nowhere near profitable?
Were they even at the point of charging customers or generating any revenue?
If detecting vomit is the biggest problem of your robotaxi fleet, you know you’ve succeeded.
No, you know you are operating in the USA.
He would know dumb
The big question for me, is did GM sink all that money into it because they are inefficient at running business (which most big corporations are) or was it just that bad of an investment. Cruise was obviously doing good things for GM to want to buy them in the first place. But could they have been successful without GM or are they unsuccessful because of GM’s big corporate mentality? (I’m not on either side, just curious)
It reminds me of when Harley bought Buell, and then shut it down because they legit didn’t know how to do that type of business.
At the time of the Cruise acquisition, autonomous robotaxis were an extremely lucrative venture and GM was far from the only OEM that had faith in the technology. GM allowed Cruise to operate as its own entity. The big corporate mindset isn’t really a factor in Cruise’s failures along the way. Poor leadership within Cruise and global economic instability are the main reasons GM is now discontinuing its investment. Autonomous robotaxis are just not ready for scale and profitability.
It’s a very high risk investment with a hundred of billion of dollar upside.
This R&D is just really expensive, apparently not something that low margin car manufacturers like GM can stomach. Imo was worth a few billion as the upside could have been great, but failure was always the default scenario.
It seems like patient capital like big tech or deep pocket VCs is needed for this though as GM needs to respond to the pressure of quarterly earnings reports and doesn’t have the swagger of Elon to sell pie in the sky for years to counter that.
10 Billion up in smoke! The stock is tanking.
Gotta love Barra’s statement:
“GM is committed to delivering the best driving experiences to our customers in a disciplined and capital efficient manner,” said GM CEO Mary Barra.
In other words, GM is committed to delivering mediocre driving experiences for the least amount of investment.
Translation: the bean counters still rule the roost at gm
Autonomous is a great idea for snowflakes who want robomommy to drive them around town .
Only the CEO and the president. Maybe the Board, too.
Reminds me of the parody “GM Burgers”, where GM buys a profitable hamburger joint and mis-manages it in to bankruptcy.
GM is supposed to hold managers to results. Announcements of “So & So has decided to pursue outside opportunities” have been very common for some time now when someone has been pushed out the door. So how high up will the punishment go for burning $10 billion on Cruise? Mary Barra, Mark Ruess? People below them? Just wondering.
No the question is how low will the punishment go as in how many more thousands of low level white collar workers will lose their jobs to pay for Barra’s Blunders?
Another GM blunder. Probably more expensive than the Saturn boondoggle or the EV1 fiasco. We will never know how much money was blown on the Ren Cen.
If Mary was “Gary” he’d have been gone years ago.
Mary, “GM is committed to delivering the best driving experiences to our customers in a disciplined and capital efficient manner,” What about the defective (fast wearing) brake pads out on some vehicles? Customer satisfaction. GM really has become sorry.
Any one who has worked in the autonomous shuttle arena is surprised that GM stuck with it this long. The Origin was totally destined to fail since it had no chance to achieve government regulatory approval. They built a whole fleet of these very expensive shuttles before they understood the hurdles they had to achieve to get these things on public roads.
Hey, Genius Kyle, you can come to the Grand Blanc Tank Plant and take your Cruise Origin vehicles which are ready for delivery!
I wonder where we would be were it not for the terrible fluke accident? Would cruise be right with waymo? I know people that have used waymo. Said they felt safe and enjoyed the experience. Autonomous vehicles are coming. The highways will be much safer. Humans crash into a lot of stuff. Constantly crashing into fixed objects and the car in front of them.
When they tried to use a Big American Car Company in one of the most liberal cities in the US there could be no other outcome. Every minor incident was met with a 1M$ fine, incidents beyond the control of vehicle/engineers netted 8 figure payouts for the “victims” . SF just saw GM as a giant evil piggybank.
GM killed fully-functioned startup instead of going public. It was an old dude mentality of the GM management, which wants to own everything, but can’t swallow it.
The right move was to sell the venture or send it public.