GM kills Cruise to focus on personal driverless cars
General Motors is to absorb robotaxi technology developer Cruise to focus on driverless cars for consumers.
The plans to realign its autonomous driving strategy and prioritize development of advanced driver assistance systems creates a path to fully autonomous personal vehicles and will save over $1bn a year.
This follows a high profile accident earlier this year with a robotaxi in San Francisco and the launch of Tesla’s robotaxi. GM will no longer fund Cruise’s robotaxi development work. Pointing to the considerable time and resources that would be needed to scale the business, along with an increasingly competitive robotaxi market.
Instead GM will build on the progress of Super Cruise, the company’s hands-off, eyes-on driving feature, now offered on more than 20 GM vehicle models and currently logging over 10 million miles per month.
The Cruise and GM technical teams will be combined into a single effort for autonomous and assisted driving technology by the middle of 2025.
“GM is committed to delivering the best driving experiences to our customers in a disciplined and capital efficient manner,” said Mary Barra, chair and CEO of GM. “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.”
“As the largest US automotive manufacturer, we’re fully committed to autonomous driving and excited to bring GM customers its benefits – things like enhanced safety, improved traffic flow, increased accessibility, and reduced driver stress,” said Dave Richardson, senior vice president of software and services engineering.
GM owns about 90% of Cruise and has agreements with other shareholders that will raise its ownership to more than 97%. It will acquire the rest of the shares as part of the restructuring with the Cruise management.
Cruise was founded in 2013, ironically developing retrofit kits for autonomous driving in consumer vehicles, and acquired by GM in 2016 with billions of dollars of investment.
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