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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

#241

Post by jcgrillo »

paxys wrote: post #236

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 auto…

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.

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

#242

Post by nopinsight »

paxys wrote: post #236

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 auto…

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-...

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

#243

Post by danans »

Terr_ wrote: post #199
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…

> Interest in autonomous driving appears to be cooling across the board. My pet theory is that it really took off because a bunch of investors were hoping to capture and capitalize on the baby boomers aging out of being able to easily drive themselves. They tried to speed up technological advancements in order to meet that window of a large more-affluent cohort of potential customers. So it might be interesting to so…

> were hoping to capture and capitalize on the baby boomers aging out of being able to easily drive themselves. They tried to speed up technological advancements in order to meet that window of a large more-affluent cohort of potential customers.

That's still a huge market. And the baby boomers are the most affluent demographic in the western world.

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

#244

Post by [deleted] »

jcgrillo wrote: post #241
paxys wrote: post #236

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 auto…

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]

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

#245

Post by cortesoft »

paxys wrote: post #236

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 auto…

That could also mean that one company just won, right? Ten companies try to do a really hard thing, nine fail, one succeeds, the nine failures close down.

Seems pretty reasonable for difficult new tech.

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

#246

Post by dmoy »

genewitch wrote: post #201
SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you from Houston originally, by chance, or from a part of western Louisiana? Anytime I hear the word “feeder” it’s a dead giveaway the person either grew up near Houston area or hung around there long enough to use this word in their lexicon

Nope! I'm from the state where i had to consciously not type "the 5, the 10" - California. I've lived in Louisiana for 12 years, total, now, though. I couldn't think of a better name for like the 405 or 710 than "feeders" - maybe tributary; i know there is a term of art for those freeways, though.

Beltway or bypass (or spur(?)) depending on the configuration.

405 in WA, OR, and CA are bypasses.

495 in DC is a beltway.

Minneapolis / St Paul has 394 - a spur (I guess?), 494/694 beltway, and 35E which really is a bypass but still carries a legacy name alongside 35W.

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

#247

Post by dilyevsky »

jrpt wrote: post #224
dilyevsky wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Even Waymo has external investors. It’s not all funded by Alphabet.

Cruise had that too - i think 2B from Honda

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

#248

Post by burlesona »

paxys wrote: post #236

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 auto…

Infrastructure for automation is happening: https://www.cavnue.com/

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

#249

Post by porphyra »

mouth wrote: post #158
porphyra wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah and neither of them is close to FSD in capabilities lol. Super Cruise/Ultra Cruise is a brittle highway-only thing, only available in a handful of $200k+ GM cars, that works by localizing to a detailed lidar map of some interstate routes.

This was also available on the Chevy Bolt EUV as an add-on for $2,200. The Bolt EUV started at $28,795, so with the add-on it could be had for ~$31k before tax, title, etc. Not sure where you got the $200k+ number.

Ultra Cruise was only available on the expensive Celestiq before it got cancelled and merged with Super Cruise. Apparently, the Celestiq starts at $340,000, even higher than my original estimate of $200k.

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

#250

Post by danans »

upbeat_general wrote: post #126
boshalfoshal wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it will be Tesla. Regulatory pressures for them just lifted, and they move faster than all the other driverless companies, courtesy of Elon's fairly hardcore mode of operation. It may not be a perfect driving solution (probably 1:1 teleoperator to car in the beginning), but their go to market speed is undeniably better than Waymo et al. Waymo, Cruise, etc have to map out an entire region and have long rollout…

Maybe I'm missing something but are there any current regulations that make it difficult to operate? My understanding was that in many states, it's mostly just paper requirements and not any strict testing, etc.

Most states and communities aren't ok with unproven AVs on their streets causing accidents and injuries, even if they are superficially politically aligned with the AV manufacturer's CEO.

That's a good thing, we shouldn't be lowering the bar for AVs.

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