38 ms·

GM exits robotaxi market, will bring Cruise operations in house

384 points by atomic128 2y ago

leesec 2y ago
The market will narrow down to 2 companies, Tesla and Comma AI, just as George Hotz has been predicting for close to a decade. Waymo will not survive
- mvkel 2y ago
  Lol. Hotz said he would fix Twitter search in a weekend, then accidentally made it very racist, then quit.
  - leesec 2y ago
    False
atomic128 2y ago
Here's an interesting "lidar gem" from Hacker News a few years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33554679 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33554679 Lidar obstacle detection algorithm from a Git repo leaked onto Tor This is a drivable region mapping (obstacle detection) algorithm found in what appears to be a git repo leaked from an autonomous vehicle company in 2017. The repo was available through one or more Tor hidden services for several years. The lidar code appears to be written for the Velodyne HDL-32E. It operates in a series of stages, each stage refining the output of the previous stage. This algorithm is in the second stage. It is the primary obstacle detection method, with the other methods making only small improvements. The leaked code uses a column-major matrix of points and it explicitly handles NaNs (the no-return points). We've rewritten it to use a much more cache-efficient row-major matrix layout and a conditional that will ignore the NaN points without explicit testing. This is an amazingly effective method of obstacle detection, considering its simplicity.
- amacneil 2y ago
  Is there any indication this object detection algo was originally from Cruise? The linked code has been rewritten and has no attribution beyond "an autonomous vehicle company". Fun fact - Cruise did actually have a source code leak a few years back, some engineer decided to embrace the 4 hour work week and outsource their role to a contractor, who uploaded their work to a public github repo (I assume this was accidental and they intended to make a private repo). But it was not core AV code.
rgovostes 2y ago
> GM said in a statement that “... an increasingly competitive robotaxi market” were the reasons for the change. Isn't there basically Google/Waymo and then, seemingly much further behind, Tesla Cybertaxi, Amazon/Zoox, and Uber/Yandex? Cruise allegedly has one of the most sophisticated autonomous driving platforms, and GM's Super Cruise (if they share any tech) is comparable to Tesla FSD. Strange that they would bow out. Small anecdote: I visited a GM dealership this week and the salesperson told me Super Cruise was not enabled for test drives. The excuse was pretty weak, like the dealership would have to pay for the service or something. GM might have the technology but they are completely bungling the strategy. Ford just lowered the cost of its BlueCruise subscription by 1/3rd. In an earnings call eight months prior they remarked they made a 70% margin on the service. It seems like drivers did not find the feature compelling and were not renewing. Interest in autonomous driving appears to be cooling across the board.
- ugh123 2y ago
  > Interest in autonomous driving appears to be cooling across the board I think you mean interest in level 3 autonomous driving appears to be cooling across the board
- leesec 2y ago
  Yes and Google has spent 20B to get to a small rollout
- com2kid 2y ago
  > Small anecdote: I visited a GM dealership this week and the salesperson told me Super Cruise was not enabled for test drives. The excuse was pretty weak, like the dealership would have to pay for the service or something. GM might have the technology but they are completely bungling the strategy. Sadly this is believable, I've asked to check out things like remote start and control of heating/cooling, and the sales people cannot show those features off because they require an app + subscription tied to the car.
  - mingus88 2y ago
    Based on my anecdotal experience, another issue is that salespeople are not trained on the tech I worked on a feature for new vehicles and the company failed in part because buyers simply didn’t know those features were part of the vehicle. Dealers never set it up for the buyer and it wasn’t something many people would think to do on their own A salesperson isn’t going to jeopardize an easy sale by bungling some fancy new feature they can’t control
cyrux004 2y ago
Going to leave this here https://blog.comma.ai/a-100x-investment-part-1/ https://blog.comma.ai/a-100x-investment-part-1/ https://blog.comma.ai/a-100x-investment-part-2/ https://blog.comma.ai/a-100x-investment-part-2/
- ollin 2y ago
  yup, george also commented on the cruise news here https://x.com/realGeorgeHotz/status/1866617393436651688 https://x.com/realGeorgeHotz/status/1866617393436651688
aanet 2y ago
Archive https://archive.is/20241210211353/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-12-10/gm-to-wind-down-robotaxi-operations-once-championed-by-ceo-barra#selection-1671.0-1674.0 https://archive.is/20241210211353/https://www.bloomberg.com/... QUOTE: Cruise and GM’s technical teams will be combined into a single effort focused on developing autonomous technology to offer in future models sold by GM, according to a statement Tuesday. GM said it will no longer fund robotaxi development work “given the considerable time and resources that would be needed to scale the business, along with an increasingly competitive robotaxi market.” It’s a big retrench for GM and Cruise, which survived a shakeout among autonomous-driving companies and restarted operations after one of its cars dragged a pedestrian last year. ... The move has significant implications for GM. Chief Executive Officer Mary Barra wanted to transform the automaker into a transportation technology company and double GM’s revenue by 2030 in part by generating $50 billion from Cruise. Without a robotaxi business to bring in fares, that goal looks remote. /QUOTE The business of robotaxis has always been a bit suspect, given the unit economics of running 1000s of taxis, each with ~$100K of equipment (even as the COGS were coming down each generation). My 2c: the only reason Waymo is succeeding (so far) is that its parent Alphabet has deeep pockets, it has a a 6th gen (?) technology of its AV driver, and they already exited the other AV trucking segment... implying they need to succeed in robotaxis, so it's all hands on deck. It also helps that they have, so far, NOT blundered their way (=> a significant pedestrian collision) the way Uber ATG did or Cruise did. This is a loong game to win, far longer than anything the tech bros have promised their their investors... We are still in the initial innings
- VirusNewbie 2y ago
  >is that its parent Alphabet has deeep pockets I wouldn't underestimate the advantage of not having to bootstrap a planet scale backend/ML platform. Look how much R&D Uber spends on software and they're not even doing the same level of ML. Waymo can just start using excess capacity across the google fleet whenever it wants for training and simulation. That's a huge advantage.
ra7 2y ago
GM believed Kyle Vogt when he was hyping up their tech by having small, meaningless deployments in a dozen cities and promising $1B revenue by 2025. Then they had that incident and GM found out exactly how far behind Waymo they are. Waymo is now giving 175k rides every week and expanding to new markets every year. No other robotaxi company in the entire country giving rides to the public. Now they've gone back to what I think GM's original plan was for acquiring Cruise — using their tech for passenger cars. Selling cars is GM's bread and butter. This wasn't going to end any other way.
- throwaway48476 2y ago
  So stupid. If something has proved to be possible then you as number 2 can hire people from 1 to replicate it. China is built on this principle.
  - lateforwork 2y ago
    Right here in the US, this is how Bill Gates built Microsoft.
  - Wytwwww 2y ago
    What Waymo is doing is very localized and really only suitable for self-driving taxis and not normal cars. Not clear if that would help GM to sell more cars in the short to medium term (and obviously their execs have no reason to care about anything else).
    - throwaway48476 2y ago
      A taxi is a car. The taxi industry is by itself profitable. GM should be in thr business of making money, with or without cars.
      - bobthepanda 2y ago
        there's a significantly lower volume of taxis sold than personal cars sold, and if taxis got bigger in the way the self driving utopians foresaw, it would significantly cut into their personal car sales.
standardUser 2y ago
Waymo needs competition. Who else is even close to being able to provide it? I'd hate to think Tesla is next in line because they haven't even started a commercial pilot program yet.
- mfkhalil 2y ago
  Zoox (Amazon Subsidiary) should be rolling out soon. They've already done successful test rides and should be launching in Las Vegas next year.
  - master_crab 2y ago
    Saw at least one zoox scooting around Vegas last week at Reinvent
    - ytpete 2y ago
      Saw one driving around SF recently too. Not the SUVs they've been testing here for years – but the full custom-built cube-shaped passenger taxi.
- Animats 2y ago
  > Who else is even close to being able to provide it? Baidu/Apollo, maybe. There are deployed robo-taxis in China. Reviews of driving quality indicate "meh", they are sometimes directly teleoperated to get out of problems, and difficult intersections have fixed cameras the cars can see through.
  - standardUser 2y ago
    From what I've read China is forging ahead very successfully, but I assume there would be a lot of friction if they tried to enter the US market, to say the least.
  - mitthrowaway2 2y ago
    Reading from intersection-mounted fixed cameras seems like a valid solution.
bfrog 2y ago
Yeah the robotaxi is a pipe dream grift. Humans are gross and nasty, I think some of these people need to do a ride along in a cab sometime in the winter in a busy poorly marked city on a Friday or Saturday night. Pray tell how the robot kicks passengers out or navigates the inevitable unexpected weather/human activity.
- Aloisius 2y ago
  > Pray tell how the robot kicks passengers out Why not just keep the meter running? Then it ceases to be a problem.
  - mensetmanusman 2y ago
    Exactly. Easy solution.
    - bfrog 2y ago
      Sounds like a dystopian hell to me. Best of luck contacting the robo help support for the robo taxi trying to explain your unique human scenario that it’s never seen I guess. You bled all over the car because you were shot and then crawled out looking for help because the AI had no clue wtf to do? Ok good luck sir, you owe us 10 days of metered fairs. No there’s no human to get help from.
      - iknowstuff 2y ago
        Yes we should be building every technology with serving this exact scenario in mind. tf is going on in your brain buddy
- lowkey_ 2y ago
  The past couple years, I've consistently used robotaxis whenever in SF. Definitely not a pipe dream.
- sidibe 2y ago
  It's wild that no one bats an eye at these things in some locations now and in other places people still insist they'll never exist
eappleby 2y ago
GM stock up 2.5% since the announcement, so it doesn't look like investors attributed that much of GM's future value to Cruise (or that shutting down the robotaxi development was already assumed)
- mensetmanusman 2y ago
  Stonks go up. No need to invest in the future since retirement is a few years away! (More holes in the life raft?)
- paxys 2y ago
  Well yeah they just cut $1B/yr of spending from their books.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
rmason 2y ago
Further proof that General Motors is run the finance types, not car guys. Wonder if they'd sell Cruise back to the founders for say a buck? Sure Cruise could then cut a deal with another auto maker. Maybe even get financing from one?
- dilyevsky 2y ago
  Cruise burn rate was to the tune of 1B a year as reported by GM. Needs to be someone with very deep pockets to put it mildly
  - cameldrv 2y ago
    GM is is making 12 billion a year of profit though. It seems like madness to cut Cruise unless there is no hope of it ever working or making a profit… The only U.S. competitor besides Waymo that’s seemingly remotely in the ballpark is Zoox.
    - dilyevsky 2y ago
      Oh believe me i agree. As a former Cruise employee (i left in 2019) it’s incredible to me how they went almost all the way only to get it gutted like that
      - whiplash451 2y ago
        "Almost all the way" is fairly far fetched when taking a candid look at the landscape for Cruise.
  - jrpt 2y ago
    Even Waymo has external investors. It’s not all funded by Alphabet.
    - dilyevsky 2y ago
      Cruise had that too - i think 2B from Honda
xyst 2y ago
About time. Cruise was an absolute joke. The number of close calls I have had with Cruise vehicles either has a pedestrian or automobile is way too high.
thr3000 2y ago
Sad news IMO. "We're not cut out for the future. We're all in on the dying business." Dunder Mifflin level stuff. Cruise cars were way more numerous around SF, although the service was worse than Waymo's. That stupid October 2023 accident really snowballed, and it wasn't even their (primary) fault.
- itake 2y ago
  my understanding is they lied to regulators. telling the truth is easy. lying is their fault.
  - infotainment 2y ago
    Agreed -- I think things would have gone much better for them if they had been upfront and transparent about the incident, instead of the sketchy cover-up.
  - jessriedel 2y ago
    Right but this is even more reason to not trash the technology.
oldpersonintx 2y ago
[dead]
Filligree 2y ago
I'm not sure I want autonomous vehicles to work. It would, inevitably, lead to more cars in cities. Probably faster cars. Both are the opposite of what we need; it isn't just about safety.
- FredPret 2y ago
  Who decides "what we need"? I say "we" do - ie, if people want to buy autonomous cars, then that's what's going to happen. Incidentally if there's a large number of autonomous cars available in a fluid and efficient market, that would probably mean fewer people need cars in total.
  - SequoiaHope 2y ago
    > I say "we" do - ie, if people want to buy autonomous cars, then that's what's going to happen. Baked in to this is the assumption that the operation of markets are democratic, but they are not. A very small number of people decide where investments go, what tech to design, and what to buy. The alternative - public transit focused infrastructure, is not available to buy in small quantities. Huge investments have to be made before anyone can “vote with their wallet” on public transit. And similarly, billions have to go in to AV development before anyone can buy in to it. And those with more money always have more “vote” in a “vote with your wallet” scenario. Fifty percent of the people in the US have so little money as to make their votes nearly meaningless in such a scenario. That’s not “us” making a decision that is very much certain people making that decision.
    - FredPret 2y ago
      > A very small number of people decide where investments go, what tech to design, and what to buy. Baked into this is a certain kind of economic unrealism that you frequently see online. Rich people aren't endless fountains of capital. They fund things that work, ie, things that sell, ie, things the public likes. Rich people who have some other investment strategy than this go broke. > Fifty percent of the people in the US have so little money as to make their votes nearly meaningless in such a scenario. I think if you look up the median wealth and income of the US, and the purchasing power of the US middle class in aggregate, you'll be very surprised by how much sway these people have. Its true that the upper-middle class and the rich are even better customers, but many fortunes have been made catering to the whims of the median American. The US consumer rules the world. And all this is just academic. Countless poor and middle class families buy cars every day because it's a way better option than living in an urban zone and taking a bus.
AbrahamParangi 2y ago
Frankly, I think Tesla is going to win this. The new self-driving is remarkably good. Based on this alone, I estimate (actual) level 5 self driving in 2-3 years. I'm convinced that the lidar sensors are essentially unnecessary and the vision-only strategy is basically going to work and be much cheaper in the process.
- brcmthrowaway 2y ago
  How does vision work at night?! RGB Cameras dont see anything...
  - mensetmanusman 2y ago
    Apparently they have been surprised at how few photons are required to see for these sensors. They are skipping the image computer vision step and going from photons to car control in as few layers as possible.
    - smaddox 2y ago
      Apparently they're using this CMOS sensor: https://www.onsemi.com/products/sensors/image-sensors/ar0136at https://www.onsemi.com/products/sensors/image-sensors/ar0136... It's not an event camera, so it's very much taking images, which are then being processed by computer vision algorithms. Event cameras seem more viable than CMOS sensors for autonomous vehicle applications in the absence of LIDAR. CMOS dynamic range and response isn't as good as the human eye. LIDAR+CMOS is considerably better in many ways.
      - astrange 2y ago
        Humans can also decide they want to get a better look at something and move their head (or block out the sun with their hands) which cameras generally don't do.
      - iknowstuff 2y ago
        Nah thats old. They now use https://www.sony-semicon.com/files/62/pdf/p-15_IMX490.pdf https://www.sony-semicon.com/files/62/pdf/p-15_IMX490.pdf and they run multiexposure on every frame. Stupid high dynamic range
idunnoman1222 2y ago
Waymo is just a guy in India driving your car
- sadeshmukh 2y ago
  It really isn't - it isn't even remotely possible
paxys 2y ago
Pretty bad news for the space as a whole. A decade and a half ago there were a dozen+ companies and tens of billions of VC dollars in the space. People were proudly proclaiming the end of driving. Now all but one of them have folded. My thoughts today are the same as they were back then. Self driving will only be solved city by city and street by street. Local governments will need to create dedicated closed-off autonomous lanes with sensors. Auto manufacturers will need to abide by a common standard to talk to local infrastructure and to each other. Instead we chose to solve the problem in the most complex and inefficient way possible, and are now seeing the results.
- nopinsight 2y ago
  With world models like Genie 2 and other advances in LMMs (large multimodal models), the aspiration of human-level autonomous vehicles might be realized relatively soon. https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/genie-2-a-large-scale-foundation-world-model/ https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/genie-2-a-large-scale-...
- jcgrillo 2y ago
  If you're going to block off lanes and install sensors why not just lay track and use streetcars? Rail is way more efficient. This has been a solved problem for the better part of two centuries.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - paxys 2y ago
    That's like asking why do cars and roads exist at all when everyone can just use public transit. The answer is that people want cars. They want to drive. They want to be taken directly from point A to point B without needing to walk to transit stops and switch buses/trains and face unpredictable schedules and delays. Autonomous road infrastructure is a sensible, incremental improvement. And in fact city buses will tend to benefit from it the most.
    - 2y ago
majestik 2y ago
GM cars and Cruise autopilot - two wrongs never made a right.
porphyra 2y ago
Ford did the same thing a few years ago when they shut down Argo and brought it in house as Latitude to work on ADAS tech instead of actual self-driving cars. Does anyone know if Latitude has shipped anything?
someonehere 2y ago
Cruise was garbage when I rode them. Sat in the car for ten minutes waiting for it to go. Someone over the car speakers said they were doing something to get my ride ready. I could have walked to my next destination but wanted to give them a chance. Waymo has been a little less expensive than Uber/Lyft for me. I just saw a Zoox autonomous vehicle today. That weird looking box with no drivers seat.
burningChrome 2y ago
GM is hemorrhaging money on several fronts: Dec 4th, 2024 GM braces for a $5 billion hit as it fights to keep up in China’s intensifying EV price war SAIC-GM revealed in a regulatory filing on Wednesday (via The New York Times) that it expects to write down between $2.6 billion and $2.9 billion in the fourth quarter. The automaker is also expecting another $2.7 billion in restructuring expenses. https://electrek.co/2024/12/04/gm-faces-5-billion-hit-ev-battle-china-intensifies/ https://electrek.co/2024/12/04/gm-faces-5-billion-hit-ev-bat...
- seanmcdirmid 2y ago
  GM has a minority ownership at 49%, so I expect that SAIC is taking an even bigger hit? Reading the article, it seems like SAIC-GM is taking the hit, not GM, so divide those losses/expenses in half and that is the effect on GM
mathattack 2y ago
GM is a finance company, not an engineering company. Even buying the engineering doesn’t work. Their last great innovation was Saturn, and they killed that too.
nojvek 2y ago
Peacetime CEO doing peacetime things when war is about to hit them while they’re asleep. That being said it’s usual in US for CEOs to be rewarded in short time with stock raises when they cut costs. Innovation is not a game for the light hearted. Google is playing that game with Waymo and ploughing billions every year. GM doesn’t have the same risk bearing culture.
alkonaut 2y ago
Which cities in which countries and climates have robotaxis (or have had robotaxis) now? It felt like there was a lot of buzz around it a while back but then it only happened in a couple of cities which were just US cities with favorable climate. Did it ever move beyond that? You'd think that if the market is really competitive, then operators would bring it to cities where it doesn't exist, rather than just all competing in the same small handful of cities?
- Shawnj2 2y ago
  I actually think robotaxis will never really catch on widely in the US outside of big cities or maybe very poor people with no other option or misc use cases like if you own a car and drop it off at the dealership or if you’re out with friends and want to go home early. Most of the US is designed for you to own a car and drive it everywhere, just because cars can drive themselves now isn’t going to make self driving taxis more convenient than driving yourself without changes to how cities are already set up. Eg if you use a taxi you have to drag all your stuff with you and it’s less convenient if you live in a place where parking is effectively guaranteed. I think it will displace the existing app based taxi market and regular taxis by offering lower prices but greed will prevent companies from pricing them low enough for them to truly get people to stop driving personal vehicles. They’re really going to do well in parts of the world where taxis are already very popular because parking is limited or expensive like Singapore, Japan, China, and Europe.
  - floxy 2y ago
    I was thinking that elderly passengers could be one use-case where robotaxis catch on. Although I guess you'd still be poor in this circumstance, since otherwise you could just own a self-driving car. Or have the self-driving car from one of your adult children drive you around when they are at work. And so I just talked myself out of robotaxis being a very big market for the elderly.
    - Shawnj2 2y ago
      Accessible taxis already exist and are probably better for elderly people since they have a drive to help you get in and out of the taxi
rjtc 2y ago
wait so are cruise employee RSU's 0 now? XD where is YC's top tech success now? Shows that most yc companies are clownshoes who pale in comparison to the tech chops of actual tech companies
yard2010 2y ago
> After spending more than $10 billion on its robotaxi unit, General Motors is abandoning its Cruise driverless ride-hailing service. Where is the money? I don't mean to be as snarky as Cruise founder, but how can you burn that amount of money and not show results?
- pulse7 2y ago
  Just hire a bunch of AI experts which earn the NHL-star-level amounts...
  - hashtag-til 2y ago
    Sadly the so-called AI experts can't be used as marketing tools to sell shirts and merchandise :)
- yreg 2y ago
  >not show results? They operated a robo taxi fleet for a time (until they got involved in an accident and mislead the following investigation), what other results would you like to see?
- lm28469 2y ago
  It's relatively easy, take a cutting edge problem that can't be solved, hire engineers paid 500k-1m/year, put them in a fancy office for 10 years.
- rasz 2y ago
  A lot of it probably burned on Cloud GPU/Compute.
gitfan86 2y ago
Tesla Driver assistance as it exists today makings driving far easier. You can relax and once you learn where it needs help very rarely take over. It only needs to continue the rate of improvement for another 9 months and you have robot taxi. Lots of people are ignoring this because of politics.
- jeremyjh 2y ago
  Its needed another 9 months for about 5 years now. Tell me, was it also for political reasons that Tesla stopped reporting disengagement data?
  - sixQuarks 2y ago
    The difference is that it’s not Elon saying this anymore. It’s the actual beta testers, and other people that work at Tesla saying this. The Elon hate is so ingrained here, people are ignoring what’s happening right in front of their eyes.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - gitfan86 2y ago
      Yes that is what i'm saying but people still have the "I HATE ELON" blinders on and can't think for themselves.
      - sixQuarks 2y ago
        It's so funny to see the mental gymnastics and just plain ignorance. We literally have videos of FSD V13 doing basically what Waymo does (and more - like highway driving), yet they all have their heads in the sand.
        jeremyjh 2y ago
        Its so funny to see Elmo stans fap to literally anything produced by the God Emperor rather than pay attention to the actual facts on the ground. Tesla has a track record of 10 years of broken promises, and frankly out-right lies about the capability of their product.
Jackosas 2y ago
[flagged]
- parthdesai 2y ago
  This is just a spam account @dang.
rangestransform 2y ago
How much did recent UAW negotiations contribute to this?

384 points by atomic128 2y ago

The market will narrow down to 2 companies, Tesla and Comma AI, just as George Hotz has been predicting for close to a decade. Waymo will not survive

mvkel 2y ago
Lol. Hotz said he would fix Twitter search in a weekend, then accidentally made it very racist, then quit.
- leesec 2y ago
  False

atomic128 2y ago

Here's an interesting "lidar gem" from Hacker News a few years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33554679 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33554679 Lidar obstacle detection algorithm from a Git repo leaked onto Tor This is a drivable region mapping (obstacle detection) algorithm found in what appears to be a git repo leaked from an autonomous vehicle company in 2017. The repo was available through one or more Tor hidden services for several years. The lidar code appears to be written for the Velodyne HDL-32E. It operates in a series of stages, each stage refining the output of the previous stage. This algorithm is in the second stage. It is the primary obstacle detection method, with the other methods making only small improvements. The leaked code uses a column-major matrix of points and it explicitly handles NaNs (the no-return points). We've rewritten it to use a much more cache-efficient row-major matrix layout and a conditional that will ignore the NaN points without explicit testing. This is an amazingly effective method of obstacle detection, considering its simplicity.

amacneil 2y ago
Is there any indication this object detection algo was originally from Cruise? The linked code has been rewritten and has no attribution beyond "an autonomous vehicle company". Fun fact - Cruise did actually have a source code leak a few years back, some engineer decided to embrace the 4 hour work week and outsource their role to a contractor, who uploaded their work to a public github repo (I assume this was accidental and they intended to make a private repo). But it was not core AV code.

rgovostes 2y ago

> GM said in a statement that “... an increasingly competitive robotaxi market” were the reasons for the change. Isn't there basically Google/Waymo and then, seemingly much further behind, Tesla Cybertaxi, Amazon/Zoox, and Uber/Yandex? Cruise allegedly has one of the most sophisticated autonomous driving platforms, and GM's Super Cruise (if they share any tech) is comparable to Tesla FSD. Strange that they would bow out. Small anecdote: I visited a GM dealership this week and the salesperson told me Super Cruise was not enabled for test drives. The excuse was pretty weak, like the dealership would have to pay for the service or something. GM might have the technology but they are completely bungling the strategy. Ford just lowered the cost of its BlueCruise subscription by 1/3rd. In an earnings call eight months prior they remarked they made a 70% margin on the service. It seems like drivers did not find the feature compelling and were not renewing. Interest in autonomous driving appears to be cooling across the board.

ugh123 2y ago
> Interest in autonomous driving appears to be cooling across the board I think you mean interest in level 3 autonomous driving appears to be cooling across the board
leesec 2y ago
Yes and Google has spent 20B to get to a small rollout
com2kid 2y ago
> Small anecdote: I visited a GM dealership this week and the salesperson told me Super Cruise was not enabled for test drives. The excuse was pretty weak, like the dealership would have to pay for the service or something. GM might have the technology but they are completely bungling the strategy. Sadly this is believable, I've asked to check out things like remote start and control of heating/cooling, and the sales people cannot show those features off because they require an app + subscription tied to the car.
- mingus88 2y ago
  Based on my anecdotal experience, another issue is that salespeople are not trained on the tech I worked on a feature for new vehicles and the company failed in part because buyers simply didn’t know those features were part of the vehicle. Dealers never set it up for the buyer and it wasn’t something many people would think to do on their own A salesperson isn’t going to jeopardize an easy sale by bungling some fancy new feature they can’t control

cyrux004 2y ago

Going to leave this here https://blog.comma.ai/a-100x-investment-part-1/ https://blog.comma.ai/a-100x-investment-part-1/ https://blog.comma.ai/a-100x-investment-part-2/ https://blog.comma.ai/a-100x-investment-part-2/

ollin 2y ago
yup, george also commented on the cruise news here https://x.com/realGeorgeHotz/status/1866617393436651688 https://x.com/realGeorgeHotz/status/1866617393436651688

aanet 2y ago

Archive https://archive.is/20241210211353/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-12-10/gm-to-wind-down-robotaxi-operations-once-championed-by-ceo-barra#selection-1671.0-1674.0 https://archive.is/20241210211353/https://www.bloomberg.com/... QUOTE: Cruise and GM’s technical teams will be combined into a single effort focused on developing autonomous technology to offer in future models sold by GM, according to a statement Tuesday. GM said it will no longer fund robotaxi development work “given the considerable time and resources that would be needed to scale the business, along with an increasingly competitive robotaxi market.” It’s a big retrench for GM and Cruise, which survived a shakeout among autonomous-driving companies and restarted operations after one of its cars dragged a pedestrian last year. ... The move has significant implications for GM. Chief Executive Officer Mary Barra wanted to transform the automaker into a transportation technology company and double GM’s revenue by 2030 in part by generating $50 billion from Cruise. Without a robotaxi business to bring in fares, that goal looks remote. /QUOTE The business of robotaxis has always been a bit suspect, given the unit economics of running 1000s of taxis, each with ~$100K of equipment (even as the COGS were coming down each generation). My 2c: the only reason Waymo is succeeding (so far) is that its parent Alphabet has deeep pockets, it has a a 6th gen (?) technology of its AV driver, and they already exited the other AV trucking segment... implying they need to succeed in robotaxis, so it's all hands on deck. It also helps that they have, so far, NOT blundered their way (=> a significant pedestrian collision) the way Uber ATG did or Cruise did. This is a loong game to win, far longer than anything the tech bros have promised their their investors... We are still in the initial innings

VirusNewbie 2y ago
>is that its parent Alphabet has deeep pockets I wouldn't underestimate the advantage of not having to bootstrap a planet scale backend/ML platform. Look how much R&D Uber spends on software and they're not even doing the same level of ML. Waymo can just start using excess capacity across the google fleet whenever it wants for training and simulation. That's a huge advantage.

ra7 2y ago

GM believed Kyle Vogt when he was hyping up their tech by having small, meaningless deployments in a dozen cities and promising $1B revenue by 2025. Then they had that incident and GM found out exactly how far behind Waymo they are. Waymo is now giving 175k rides every week and expanding to new markets every year. No other robotaxi company in the entire country giving rides to the public. Now they've gone back to what I think GM's original plan was for acquiring Cruise — using their tech for passenger cars. Selling cars is GM's bread and butter. This wasn't going to end any other way.

throwaway48476 2y ago
So stupid. If something has proved to be possible then you as number 2 can hire people from 1 to replicate it. China is built on this principle.
- lateforwork 2y ago
  Right here in the US, this is how Bill Gates built Microsoft.
- Wytwwww 2y ago
  What Waymo is doing is very localized and really only suitable for self-driving taxis and not normal cars. Not clear if that would help GM to sell more cars in the short to medium term (and obviously their execs have no reason to care about anything else).
  - throwaway48476 2y ago
    A taxi is a car. The taxi industry is by itself profitable. GM should be in thr business of making money, with or without cars.
    - bobthepanda 2y ago
      there's a significantly lower volume of taxis sold than personal cars sold, and if taxis got bigger in the way the self driving utopians foresaw, it would significantly cut into their personal car sales.

standardUser 2y ago

Waymo needs competition. Who else is even close to being able to provide it? I'd hate to think Tesla is next in line because they haven't even started a commercial pilot program yet.

mfkhalil 2y ago
Zoox (Amazon Subsidiary) should be rolling out soon. They've already done successful test rides and should be launching in Las Vegas next year.
- master_crab 2y ago
  Saw at least one zoox scooting around Vegas last week at Reinvent
  - ytpete 2y ago
    Saw one driving around SF recently too. Not the SUVs they've been testing here for years – but the full custom-built cube-shaped passenger taxi.
Animats 2y ago
> Who else is even close to being able to provide it? Baidu/Apollo, maybe. There are deployed robo-taxis in China. Reviews of driving quality indicate "meh", they are sometimes directly teleoperated to get out of problems, and difficult intersections have fixed cameras the cars can see through.
- standardUser 2y ago
  From what I've read China is forging ahead very successfully, but I assume there would be a lot of friction if they tried to enter the US market, to say the least.
- mitthrowaway2 2y ago
  Reading from intersection-mounted fixed cameras seems like a valid solution.

bfrog 2y ago

Yeah the robotaxi is a pipe dream grift. Humans are gross and nasty, I think some of these people need to do a ride along in a cab sometime in the winter in a busy poorly marked city on a Friday or Saturday night. Pray tell how the robot kicks passengers out or navigates the inevitable unexpected weather/human activity.

Aloisius 2y ago
> Pray tell how the robot kicks passengers out Why not just keep the meter running? Then it ceases to be a problem.
- mensetmanusman 2y ago
  Exactly. Easy solution.
  - bfrog 2y ago
    Sounds like a dystopian hell to me. Best of luck contacting the robo help support for the robo taxi trying to explain your unique human scenario that it’s never seen I guess. You bled all over the car because you were shot and then crawled out looking for help because the AI had no clue wtf to do? Ok good luck sir, you owe us 10 days of metered fairs. No there’s no human to get help from.
    - iknowstuff 2y ago
      Yes we should be building every technology with serving this exact scenario in mind. tf is going on in your brain buddy
lowkey_ 2y ago
The past couple years, I've consistently used robotaxis whenever in SF. Definitely not a pipe dream.
sidibe 2y ago
It's wild that no one bats an eye at these things in some locations now and in other places people still insist they'll never exist

eappleby 2y ago

GM stock up 2.5% since the announcement, so it doesn't look like investors attributed that much of GM's future value to Cruise (or that shutting down the robotaxi development was already assumed)

mensetmanusman 2y ago
Stonks go up. No need to invest in the future since retirement is a few years away! (More holes in the life raft?)
paxys 2y ago
Well yeah they just cut $1B/yr of spending from their books.

deleted 2y ago

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rmason 2y ago

Further proof that General Motors is run the finance types, not car guys. Wonder if they'd sell Cruise back to the founders for say a buck? Sure Cruise could then cut a deal with another auto maker. Maybe even get financing from one?

dilyevsky 2y ago
Cruise burn rate was to the tune of 1B a year as reported by GM. Needs to be someone with very deep pockets to put it mildly
- cameldrv 2y ago
  GM is is making 12 billion a year of profit though. It seems like madness to cut Cruise unless there is no hope of it ever working or making a profit… The only U.S. competitor besides Waymo that’s seemingly remotely in the ballpark is Zoox.
  - dilyevsky 2y ago
    Oh believe me i agree. As a former Cruise employee (i left in 2019) it’s incredible to me how they went almost all the way only to get it gutted like that
    - whiplash451 2y ago
      "Almost all the way" is fairly far fetched when taking a candid look at the landscape for Cruise.
- jrpt 2y ago
  Even Waymo has external investors. It’s not all funded by Alphabet.
  - dilyevsky 2y ago
    Cruise had that too - i think 2B from Honda

xyst 2y ago

About time. Cruise was an absolute joke. The number of close calls I have had with Cruise vehicles either has a pedestrian or automobile is way too high.

thr3000 2y ago

Sad news IMO. "We're not cut out for the future. We're all in on the dying business." Dunder Mifflin level stuff. Cruise cars were way more numerous around SF, although the service was worse than Waymo's. That stupid October 2023 accident really snowballed, and it wasn't even their (primary) fault.

itake 2y ago
my understanding is they lied to regulators. telling the truth is easy. lying is their fault.
- infotainment 2y ago
  Agreed -- I think things would have gone much better for them if they had been upfront and transparent about the incident, instead of the sketchy cover-up.
- jessriedel 2y ago
  Right but this is even more reason to not trash the technology.

oldpersonintx 2y ago

[dead]

Filligree 2y ago

I'm not sure I want autonomous vehicles to work. It would, inevitably, lead to more cars in cities. Probably faster cars. Both are the opposite of what we need; it isn't just about safety.

FredPret 2y ago
Who decides "what we need"? I say "we" do - ie, if people want to buy autonomous cars, then that's what's going to happen. Incidentally if there's a large number of autonomous cars available in a fluid and efficient market, that would probably mean fewer people need cars in total.
- SequoiaHope 2y ago
  > I say "we" do - ie, if people want to buy autonomous cars, then that's what's going to happen. Baked in to this is the assumption that the operation of markets are democratic, but they are not. A very small number of people decide where investments go, what tech to design, and what to buy. The alternative - public transit focused infrastructure, is not available to buy in small quantities. Huge investments have to be made before anyone can “vote with their wallet” on public transit. And similarly, billions have to go in to AV development before anyone can buy in to it. And those with more money always have more “vote” in a “vote with your wallet” scenario. Fifty percent of the people in the US have so little money as to make their votes nearly meaningless in such a scenario. That’s not “us” making a decision that is very much certain people making that decision.
  - FredPret 2y ago
    > A very small number of people decide where investments go, what tech to design, and what to buy. Baked into this is a certain kind of economic unrealism that you frequently see online. Rich people aren't endless fountains of capital. They fund things that work, ie, things that sell, ie, things the public likes. Rich people who have some other investment strategy than this go broke. > Fifty percent of the people in the US have so little money as to make their votes nearly meaningless in such a scenario. I think if you look up the median wealth and income of the US, and the purchasing power of the US middle class in aggregate, you'll be very surprised by how much sway these people have. Its true that the upper-middle class and the rich are even better customers, but many fortunes have been made catering to the whims of the median American. The US consumer rules the world. And all this is just academic. Countless poor and middle class families buy cars every day because it's a way better option than living in an urban zone and taking a bus.

AbrahamParangi 2y ago

Frankly, I think Tesla is going to win this. The new self-driving is remarkably good. Based on this alone, I estimate (actual) level 5 self driving in 2-3 years. I'm convinced that the lidar sensors are essentially unnecessary and the vision-only strategy is basically going to work and be much cheaper in the process.

brcmthrowaway 2y ago
How does vision work at night?! RGB Cameras dont see anything...
- mensetmanusman 2y ago
  Apparently they have been surprised at how few photons are required to see for these sensors. They are skipping the image computer vision step and going from photons to car control in as few layers as possible.
  - smaddox 2y ago
    Apparently they're using this CMOS sensor: https://www.onsemi.com/products/sensors/image-sensors/ar0136at https://www.onsemi.com/products/sensors/image-sensors/ar0136... It's not an event camera, so it's very much taking images, which are then being processed by computer vision algorithms. Event cameras seem more viable than CMOS sensors for autonomous vehicle applications in the absence of LIDAR. CMOS dynamic range and response isn't as good as the human eye. LIDAR+CMOS is considerably better in many ways.
    - astrange 2y ago
      Humans can also decide they want to get a better look at something and move their head (or block out the sun with their hands) which cameras generally don't do.
    - iknowstuff 2y ago
      Nah thats old. They now use https://www.sony-semicon.com/files/62/pdf/p-15_IMX490.pdf https://www.sony-semicon.com/files/62/pdf/p-15_IMX490.pdf and they run multiexposure on every frame. Stupid high dynamic range

idunnoman1222 2y ago

Waymo is just a guy in India driving your car

sadeshmukh 2y ago
It really isn't - it isn't even remotely possible

paxys 2y ago

Pretty bad news for the space as a whole. A decade and a half ago there were a dozen+ companies and tens of billions of VC dollars in the space. People were proudly proclaiming the end of driving. Now all but one of them have folded. My thoughts today are the same as they were back then. Self driving will only be solved city by city and street by street. Local governments will need to create dedicated closed-off autonomous lanes with sensors. Auto manufacturers will need to abide by a common standard to talk to local infrastructure and to each other. Instead we chose to solve the problem in the most complex and inefficient way possible, and are now seeing the results.

nopinsight 2y ago
With world models like Genie 2 and other advances in LMMs (large multimodal models), the aspiration of human-level autonomous vehicles might be realized relatively soon. https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/genie-2-a-large-scale-foundation-world-model/ https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/genie-2-a-large-scale-...
jcgrillo 2y ago
If you're going to block off lanes and install sensors why not just lay track and use streetcars? Rail is way more efficient. This has been a solved problem for the better part of two centuries.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- paxys 2y ago
  That's like asking why do cars and roads exist at all when everyone can just use public transit. The answer is that people want cars. They want to drive. They want to be taken directly from point A to point B without needing to walk to transit stops and switch buses/trains and face unpredictable schedules and delays. Autonomous road infrastructure is a sensible, incremental improvement. And in fact city buses will tend to benefit from it the most.
  - 2y ago

majestik 2y ago

GM cars and Cruise autopilot - two wrongs never made a right.

porphyra 2y ago

Ford did the same thing a few years ago when they shut down Argo and brought it in house as Latitude to work on ADAS tech instead of actual self-driving cars. Does anyone know if Latitude has shipped anything?

someonehere 2y ago

Cruise was garbage when I rode them. Sat in the car for ten minutes waiting for it to go. Someone over the car speakers said they were doing something to get my ride ready. I could have walked to my next destination but wanted to give them a chance. Waymo has been a little less expensive than Uber/Lyft for me. I just saw a Zoox autonomous vehicle today. That weird looking box with no drivers seat.

burningChrome 2y ago

GM is hemorrhaging money on several fronts: Dec 4th, 2024 GM braces for a $5 billion hit as it fights to keep up in China’s intensifying EV price war SAIC-GM revealed in a regulatory filing on Wednesday (via The New York Times) that it expects to write down between $2.6 billion and $2.9 billion in the fourth quarter. The automaker is also expecting another $2.7 billion in restructuring expenses. https://electrek.co/2024/12/04/gm-faces-5-billion-hit-ev-battle-china-intensifies/ https://electrek.co/2024/12/04/gm-faces-5-billion-hit-ev-bat...

seanmcdirmid 2y ago
GM has a minority ownership at 49%, so I expect that SAIC is taking an even bigger hit? Reading the article, it seems like SAIC-GM is taking the hit, not GM, so divide those losses/expenses in half and that is the effect on GM

mathattack 2y ago

GM is a finance company, not an engineering company. Even buying the engineering doesn’t work. Their last great innovation was Saturn, and they killed that too.

nojvek 2y ago

Peacetime CEO doing peacetime things when war is about to hit them while they’re asleep. That being said it’s usual in US for CEOs to be rewarded in short time with stock raises when they cut costs. Innovation is not a game for the light hearted. Google is playing that game with Waymo and ploughing billions every year. GM doesn’t have the same risk bearing culture.

alkonaut 2y ago

Which cities in which countries and climates have robotaxis (or have had robotaxis) now? It felt like there was a lot of buzz around it a while back but then it only happened in a couple of cities which were just US cities with favorable climate. Did it ever move beyond that? You'd think that if the market is really competitive, then operators would bring it to cities where it doesn't exist, rather than just all competing in the same small handful of cities?

Shawnj2 2y ago
I actually think robotaxis will never really catch on widely in the US outside of big cities or maybe very poor people with no other option or misc use cases like if you own a car and drop it off at the dealership or if you’re out with friends and want to go home early. Most of the US is designed for you to own a car and drive it everywhere, just because cars can drive themselves now isn’t going to make self driving taxis more convenient than driving yourself without changes to how cities are already set up. Eg if you use a taxi you have to drag all your stuff with you and it’s less convenient if you live in a place where parking is effectively guaranteed. I think it will displace the existing app based taxi market and regular taxis by offering lower prices but greed will prevent companies from pricing them low enough for them to truly get people to stop driving personal vehicles. They’re really going to do well in parts of the world where taxis are already very popular because parking is limited or expensive like Singapore, Japan, China, and Europe.
- floxy 2y ago
  I was thinking that elderly passengers could be one use-case where robotaxis catch on. Although I guess you'd still be poor in this circumstance, since otherwise you could just own a self-driving car. Or have the self-driving car from one of your adult children drive you around when they are at work. And so I just talked myself out of robotaxis being a very big market for the elderly.
  - Shawnj2 2y ago
    Accessible taxis already exist and are probably better for elderly people since they have a drive to help you get in and out of the taxi

rjtc 2y ago

wait so are cruise employee RSU's 0 now? XD where is YC's top tech success now? Shows that most yc companies are clownshoes who pale in comparison to the tech chops of actual tech companies

yard2010 2y ago

> After spending more than $10 billion on its robotaxi unit, General Motors is abandoning its Cruise driverless ride-hailing service. Where is the money? I don't mean to be as snarky as Cruise founder, but how can you burn that amount of money and not show results?

pulse7 2y ago
Just hire a bunch of AI experts which earn the NHL-star-level amounts...
- hashtag-til 2y ago
  Sadly the so-called AI experts can't be used as marketing tools to sell shirts and merchandise :)
yreg 2y ago
>not show results? They operated a robo taxi fleet for a time (until they got involved in an accident and mislead the following investigation), what other results would you like to see?
lm28469 2y ago
It's relatively easy, take a cutting edge problem that can't be solved, hire engineers paid 500k-1m/year, put them in a fancy office for 10 years.
rasz 2y ago
A lot of it probably burned on Cloud GPU/Compute.

gitfan86 2y ago

Tesla Driver assistance as it exists today makings driving far easier. You can relax and once you learn where it needs help very rarely take over. It only needs to continue the rate of improvement for another 9 months and you have robot taxi. Lots of people are ignoring this because of politics.

jeremyjh 2y ago
Its needed another 9 months for about 5 years now. Tell me, was it also for political reasons that Tesla stopped reporting disengagement data?
- sixQuarks 2y ago
  The difference is that it’s not Elon saying this anymore. It’s the actual beta testers, and other people that work at Tesla saying this. The Elon hate is so ingrained here, people are ignoring what’s happening right in front of their eyes.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - gitfan86 2y ago
    Yes that is what i'm saying but people still have the "I HATE ELON" blinders on and can't think for themselves.
    - sixQuarks 2y ago
      It's so funny to see the mental gymnastics and just plain ignorance. We literally have videos of FSD V13 doing basically what Waymo does (and more - like highway driving), yet they all have their heads in the sand.
      - jeremyjh 2y ago
        Its so funny to see Elmo stans fap to literally anything produced by the God Emperor rather than pay attention to the actual facts on the ground. Tesla has a track record of 10 years of broken promises, and frankly out-right lies about the capability of their product.

Jackosas 2y ago

[flagged]

parthdesai 2y ago
This is just a spam account @dang.

rangestransform 2y ago

How much did recent UAW negotiations contribute to this?