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GM exits robotaxi market, will bring Cruise operations in house

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Re: GM exits robotaxi market, will bring Cruise operations in house

#101

Post by cyberax »

schiffern wrote: post #27
rgovostes wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not sure I have all the facts straight but: Super Cruise and BlueCruise are features available on GM and Ford passenger cars, respectively. They aren't taxi services. I tried to make the distinction between companies participating in the "increasingly competitive robotaxi market" versus just the ones that have some level of autonomous driving capability; tweaked comment. GM was majority stakeholder in Cruise, wh…

The difference is that GM and Ford have no viable strategy for transitioning these features into taxi services, whereas Tesla does. Not sure how it's suddenly so controversial to realize that Detroit is terrible at software strategy. This has been the conventional wisdom (and with good reason) for quite some time.

> whereas Tesla does

LOL, no. Tesla has a gimmicky car that is supposed to be a taxi, with zero planning for the infrastructure (so far).

Re: GM exits robotaxi market, will bring Cruise operations in house

#102

Post by SoftTalker »

mingus88 wrote: post #10
com2kid wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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 fanc…

I’d guess this is at least half the features on my iPhone. I’m sure it can do things that I’m not even thinking a phone can do, but nobody set anything up, and it’s not very obvious or discoverable.

Re: GM exits robotaxi market, will bring Cruise operations in house

#103

Post by cameldrv »

dilyevsky wrote: post #52
rmason wrote: post #46

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?

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

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.

Re: GM exits robotaxi market, will bring Cruise operations in house

#104

Post by derektank »

fyrn_ wrote: post #63
fixprix wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how Waymo is going to survive the onslaught that is CyberCab. Cheaper to build and operate, more efficient, much faster to build, and deployable across all cities without any manual configuration. The clock is ticking on Waymo, they have 2 years to figure out how to compete otherwise they're cooked. It's very similar to legacy space and internet, the existing players saw SpaceX coming years out, did nothi…

There is no proof that tesla can make FSD work with the level of safety they would need for a robitaxi service. Especially with camera only. If they do pull that off, or are able pivot to a fused sensor architecture then I do think their hardware potential will make them a good competitor.

I agree completely with everything you've said, but it's worth keeping in mind that if legal/compliance requirements were to be loosened, a company could expand their offerings with a less robust safety record. And someone close to the incoming presidential administration would be in a position to influence what those requirements are.

Re: GM exits robotaxi market, will bring Cruise operations in house

#105

Post by AnotherGoodName »

throwaway48476 wrote: post #16
ra7 wrote: post #13

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 wha…

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.

That would require paying more than competitors and that’s unacceptable to anyone except for the successful companies that commonly do just this.

I’m serious about this point too. Eg. Intel pays less than half of what tsmc in Taiwan pays for similar jobs on a ppp basis after 20years of wage freezes and cuts at intel. They can’t poach any talent and investors want more layoffs and wage freezes next quarter to fix the decline they see. GM is similar. It’s not going to turn around and start competing in the high end labor market reasonably. It can’t. The big shareholders would sack the ceo in seconds. Think GM could ever compete with Google (Waymo) in a market where ai engineers can earn ) 1m/yr? Ha! The MBAs wouldn’t allow it for a second.

Re: GM exits robotaxi market, will bring Cruise operations in house

#106

Post by tomcam »

FloorEgg wrote: post #99
axus wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't Tesla service worse than the dealerships? Maybe things have changed, my opinion is completely based on what I've read on the Internet.

[flagged]

How can you possibly know these things?

Re: GM exits robotaxi market, will bring Cruise operations in house

#107

Post by ec109685 »

ra7 wrote: post #13

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 wha…

There was so much noise about autonomous vehicles in SF from first responders and other officials. There was a segment that dismissed this as histrionics about self-driving cars.

As soon as Cruise closed up shop, the complaints went way down.

Re: GM exits robotaxi market, will bring Cruise operations in house

#108

Post by Sephr »

Animats wrote: post #37
ra7 wrote: post #13

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 wha…

Cruise started as "fake it til you make it", with a drive down the Great Highway in San Francisco. The ideal public road - several miles of straight road with no cross streets. They managed to parlay that into an acquisition by GM and board seats on GM's board. Then they didn't deliver. Waymo hasn't left blood on the pavement. Cruise and Tesla have.

Well, no human blood. A Waymo has hit a dog in what seemed like an unavoidable accident.

Re: GM exits robotaxi market, will bring Cruise operations in house

#109

Post by jfoster »

bobthepanda wrote: post #87
jfoster wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If taxis got bigger it would cut into personal sales, yes, but it creates a new revenue stream whereby they take a cut of every ride. The price anchor in that new revenue stream traditionally accounts for the cost of having a human driver, which a self-driving car doesn't need, so they would likely be off to a really good start in terms of profitability. Especially considering they have already paid for a significant…

that's a sunk cost fallacy and that assumes that the software spending on Cruise is salvageable. They never really restarted Cruise robotaxis after suspending the testing last year.

That's true. Their technology direction is probably not efficient.

You can see something similar happening with Waymo. If it were actually scalable & in sight of a promising ROI, why wouldn't Alphabet fund it themselves rather than bringing in outside investment?

Re: GM exits robotaxi market, will bring Cruise operations in house

#110

Post by boshalfoshal »

rgovostes wrote: post #3

> 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…

Supercruise might be comparable to Tesla's "Autosteer" product but its incomparable to Tesla's paid "FSD Supervised" product. The latter is closer to a Waymo or Cruise than it is to a Mercedes or GM driver assist.
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