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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

#21

Post by Wytwwww »

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.

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).

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

#22

Post by ra7 »

jamiequint wrote: post #20
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…

[flagged]

Nope. But feel free to add something substantial to what I said.

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

#23

Post by mfkhalil »

standardUser wrote: post #19

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.

Zoox (Amazon Subsidiary) should be rolling out soon. They've already done successful test rides and should be launching in Las Vegas next year.

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

#24

Post by throwaway48476 »

Wytwwww wrote: post #21
throwaway48476 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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).

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.

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

#25

Post by atomic128 »

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…

A quick search of Hacker News brings up many warnings, presumably from engineers inside the company.

For example: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=reTensor

It was well-known and well-leaked that something was wrong with Cruise.

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

#26

Post by seltzered_ »

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…

Related: https://bsky.app/profile/niedermeyer.io/post/3kdca25huko2e ->

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-02-02/safety-nu... (2018)

https://safeautonomy.blogspot.com/2023/10/a-snapshot-of-crui... (2023)

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

#27

Post by schiffern »

rgovostes wrote: post #15
schiffern wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GM SuperCruise and Ford BluesClues are comparable products, so I don't know why you'd exclude Tesla's product as not "operating in any markets." Other companies have neat AV demos (some that they even make people pay for), but fundamentally they can't and won't scale.

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.

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

#28

Post by rgovostes »

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.

I briefly owned a Chevy Volt with the worst infotainment UX imaginable. I found a quote from a Chevy spokesperson describing it as an "Apple-like experience," presumably because the graphic designer on Fiverr found the Gradient tool in their pirated copy of Illustrator CS6.

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

#29

Post by jerlam »

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…

I am not sure you want to include international markets (if not the technology) but it seems like Baidu in China is nearly at par with Waymo:

https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/18/cars/china-baidu-apollo-go-ro...

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

#30

Post by standardUser »

jamiequint wrote: post #20
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…

[flagged]

Ad hominems aside, it's easy to cheerlead Waymo since they stand alone as the nation's only commercial robotaxi service. They're expanding, their track record is exceptional, and having used them a handful of times they definitely leave an impression.
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