Source: CNN
General Motors is pulling the plug on its efforts to develop a fleet of driverless taxis and will focus on driver-assistance features that require a driver to be ready to take control of the car, the company said Tuesday.
GM is dropping robotaxi efforts “given the considerable time and resources that would be needed to scale the business, along with an increasingly competitive robotaxi market,” the company said in a statement.
The Detroit-based automaker’s robotaxi efforts had been run by a company called Cruise, of which GM owns 90%. Many of the Cruise employees who have worked on self-driving technology will be shifted over to GM to work on driver-assist features for privately owned cars, such as Super Cruise, a hands-off, eyes-on driving feature that’s now offered on more than 20 GM vehicles. GM said the move will cut costs by $1 billion annually after the combination is complete.
GM said it will instead focus on driver-assistance features rather than fully autonomous vehicles; developing a fleet of robotaxis would have required more than $10 billion, the company added.
GM faces competition in the robotaxi market from Google’s Waymo unit, in partnership with Uber, as well as from ride-hailing and taxi services that use human drivers. And earlier this fall, Tesla announced plans for new driverless vehicles without steering wheels, brakes or accelerators, as well as for a robotaxi service that would allow drivers to rent out their Teslas to the service when they aren’t using the cars.
But GM has decided it no longer makes sense to compete in that sector. CEO Mary Barra told investors Tuesday that the company decided the robotaxi service was not part of its core business, and that shifting its self-driving technology efforts to driver-assist features will help with the products it offers to car buyers.
Cruise also came under fire over the past few years after an October 2023 incident in which its self-driving taxis in San Francisco hit a pedestrian and dragged the woman along the road for 20 feet. California authorities ordered the company to halt its operations in the state as a result, and GM subsequently suspended the service nationwide.
Last month, Cruise agreed to pay a $500,000 fine as part of a deferred prosecution agreement that resolved potential federal criminal charges for providing a false record to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration about that accident.
The October 2023 accident happened after the woman had already been hit by another car that had a human driver at the wheel. GM and other advocates of self-driving vehicles have insisted that self-driving cars can become safer than those driven by humans. GM has even set a goal for electrification and autonomous technology to produce cars with “zero crashes, zero emissions, and zero congestion.”
The decision to stop funding robotaxis is clearly a step back from that target, but it did not represent a total abandonment of fully autonomous vehicles, Barra said Tuesday.
“Cruise has been an early innovator in autonomy,” Barra said in her statement. She said combining Cruise’s efforts for self-driving vehicles with GM’s efforts to provide assistance to drivers “will help advance our vision for the future of transportation.”
“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 at GM.
This story has been updated with additional context and information.