On the Problem of Cruise & Barra: How GM Will Get It Wrong, How It Arises, and How It Will End

When it finishes acquiring the remaining shares, GM anticipates achieving cost savings of $1 billion annually, GM chief financial officer Paul Jacobson said.

Behind the scenes, Cruise was also a mess. The company’s first CEO, Dan Ammann, was sacked after sparring with Barra over the future direction of the company. Barra thought GM should be using Cruise’s technology to power everything from luxury self-driving Cadillacs to commercial vans, according to Bloomberg. Ammann wanted to get the service up and running before affecting the other parts of the company. He also wanted to take Cruise public so it could use its public stock to lure in top talent. GM could eventually get the rewards if it kept it in-house.

Cruise paid the price for moving too aggressively. The company had 5 million miles of real world testing under their belt and then there were embarrassing incidents. Its driverless vehicles were blocking traffic or running into emergency vehicles in San Francisco. The city’s fire chief said that the vehicles were “not ready for prime time,” citing over six dozen incidents in which robotaxis interfered with fire trucks.

Ultimately, the project became too expensive for GM to justify the huge amounts of money spent to prop it up. It became harder to convince its shareholders that the money-loss operation would eventually pay off. The subsidiary has been seen by some as an albatross for the manufacturer because of its large losses and lack of a clear path to profits.

In an increasingly competitive market, combining forces would be more efficient and so would our capital allocation priorities, Barra said on the call.

Analysis of Super Cruise at the U.S. Naval Collider and Future Prospects for Robot Axis and Self-Driving

The Super Cruise tech is designed to perform a few tasks, such as lane keeping, lane changing, and emergency brakes, on specific highways. Drivers are warned to remain alert because Super Cruise cannot drive autonomously.

Eventually, GM intends to sell “level 4” vehicles to car buyers, which can drive completely autonomously on some but not all roads. “We know people everywhere love to drive their own vehicles, but not in every situation,” Barra told analysts.

General Motors owns 90 percent of Cruise and says it has reached an agreement with other shareholders to own more than 97 percent of the firm. GM will “restructure and refocus” Cruise as part of the effort, but Barra could not say whether the new arrangement would lead to layoffs.

Dave Richardson, senior vice president of software and services engineering, said Cruise will bring its software, artificial intelligence and sensor development to GM to team up on improving GM’s driver-assist systems.

Alphabet Inc.’s Waymo is accelerating plans to broaden its robotaxi service beyond areas of metropolitan Phoenix, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Last week the company said it would begin testing its driverless Jaguars in Miami next year, with plans to start charging for rides in 2026.

Musk said that Model Y and 3 will be running without human drivers next year. In California and Texas, robotaxis without steering wheels would be available in the year 2026.

The agency began the investigation in October after getting reports of four crashes involving “Full Self-Driving” when Teslas encountered sun glare, fog and airborne dust. An Arizona pedestrian was killed in one of the crashes.

Two years ago Ford pulled its funding for a startup that was financed by the company. It cited as one of its reasons a belief that partial autonomy — often described as Level 3 or Level 3-plus — will have more near-term payoffs.

GM invested billions in the subsidiary and eventually took over most of the company from investors, which left them with millions in losses.

The Loss of a Driverless Cruise Car Caused by an Innocent, Robotic Pedestrian-Runaway in San Francisco

A lot of technological progress has been made. Not too long ago, Cruise had driverless cars ferrying passengers across San Francisco. The company said it was on the verge of getting approval to deploy its steering wheel. Origin shuttles are used in a bid to move more people.

A Cruise vehicle in San Francisco hit a pedestrian and dragged her over 20 feet. The hit-and-run driver launched her into the path of the Cruise car, after hitting the victim.

But more importantly, the incident damaged Cruise’s effort to win the public’s trust. San Francisco residents were unhappy with the number of times the company’s cars bumped into their emergency vehicles. The suggestion that robot cars were needed to increase street safety was deemed offensive by proponents of car-free transportation. And regulators didn’t like being misled about a dangerous incident.

The total ownership of a century-old manufacturing giant was never going to succeed, according to Ray Wert, the former communications director at Cruise.

Driver-assistance technologies, especially so-called Level 3 systems, carry their own risks. There are studies that show how fraught the hand off between a partially automated system and a human driver is.

When people have been disconnected from driving for a long period of time, they may overreact in an emergency situation. They may overcorrect steering, brake too hard, or be unable to respond correctly because they haven’t been paying attention. And those actions can create a domino effect that has the potential to be dangerous — perhaps even fatal.