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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

#301

Post by nradov »

jcgrillo wrote: post #283
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…

This seems like an industry wide admission that this stuff doesn't actually work, tbh. I've heard similar things from Farley at Ford--advanced lane keeping cruise control systems work, robotaxis don't. Only the "tech" companies are so committed as to double down and try to wish this sci-fi into reality. The car companies are a little more grounded in reality.

But Waymo actually works? It's limited by geography and speed but they have robotaxis carrying paying customers in multiple cities. This is reality today, not sci-fi.

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

#302

Post by aprilthird2021 »

honeybadger1 wrote: post #71
Animats wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

considering humans leave oceans of blood in their wake with their own driving, all of the autonomous driving companies are doing great by your measurement of success

There's always someone saying this, and they always don't seem to realize that random humans aren't a company with billions of dollars in investment. If your billion dollar investment kills someone and you are even possibly found liable, that can kill the whole company right there

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

#304

Post by BoorishBears »

AnotherGoodName wrote: post #105
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.

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…

My Cruise offer was the highest of the 3 AV companies I got offers from. Cruise was known for great comp and worse working conditions/tech when I was searching

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

#305

Post by dangus »

makestuff wrote: post #194
dangus wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Automakers started out with direct sales. Anti-trust issues quickly arose with that business model and that’s where we got dealership laws, as imperfect as they may be. The document is rather one-sided and slanted, but I think it’s interesting to see how a dealership association explains their perspective: https://www.nada.org/media/3267/download?inline Of particular interest is warranty issues. Tesla has an extra-st…

Dealerships also make most of their profit from the service departments which is why they don’t really like EVs. No longer do you need to go in every 3-6 months to get an oil change, belt replacement, spark plugs, etc.

1. There are still service items on a Tesla that are relatively frequent. Tires rotated every 6,400 miles, brake calipers cleaned and lubricated yearly for northern climates with salted roads, cabin air filter changed every 2 years, and two other service items every 4 years.

2. This is technically a tangent to the issue at hand. If Tesla was a gasoline vehicle startup they would have the same incentives to avoid dealership franchises, perhaps an even stronger incentive.

3. The fact that vehicle service is the most profitable part of the business is a great argument for the dealership model. Tesla owning their own service centers means that they are directly incentivized not to fix reliability problems in their vehicles, while all the car companies who have to pay out dealerships to handle recalls and warranty claims have a direct incentive to produce a reliable vehicle. Lo and behold, Tesla is about halfway down the vehicle reliability list according to consumer reports. At least they're better than Chrysler?

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

#306

Post by mkhalil »

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 visited a GM dealership this week and the salesperson told me Super Cruise was not enabled for test drives."

Seems like a) the salesperson might not know his vehicles and perhaps it just wasn't a Super Cruise enabled vehicle (meaning, it wasn't added-on to that specific vehicle). b) the actual Super-Cruise module was broken in that vehicle, and that was his excuse c) he didn't know how or wasn't comfortable with telling you how to enable it. (some people are still quite afraid of giving full control over to computers)

I have tested numerous vehicles with Super Cruise; I quite enjoyed it.

I could be wrong, but unless it's a new GM rule, afaik, and with my understanding of how dealerships work (as far as the ones I've visited), dealerships try to avoid messing with the vehicle programming as much as they can. It's rather sad, as aside from the manufactures, dealerships have the most tools and access to the vehicles programming, but rarely-if-ever stray from the service manual.

Custom programming kind of is a market for that reason.

Living in a state with a very large automotive industry, there are a lot of people who have the tools + knowledge that offer custom programming services like: Programming the key fob that if one was to hold the unlock-door button for 5 seconds, the driver side window opens. And if the lock button is pressed once, then held for 5 seconds, all the windows are rolled up. Enabling a bunch of different video codecs/formats and enabling video-playback while the car is in motion if the passenger seat detects something siting there, etc, etc...

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

#307

Post by BoorishBears »

paxys wrote: post #290
achierius wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? Cruise was paying $400k+ for like 3YoE. I don't think China is paying more than that.

And how much is that $400K of equity worth today?

Cruise had extremely competitive base, and you're in a thread trying to partially attribute their downfall to a lack of comp: so how much that equity is worth after a downfall is a bit of a non-sequitur

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

#308

Post by jcgrillo »

nradov wrote: post #301
jcgrillo wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems like an industry wide admission that this stuff doesn't actually work, tbh. I've heard similar things from Farley at Ford--advanced lane keeping cruise control systems work, robotaxis don't. Only the "tech" companies are so committed as to double down and try to wish this sci-fi into reality. The car companies are a little more grounded in reality.

But Waymo actually works? It's limited by geography and speed but they have robotaxis carrying paying customers in multiple cities. This is reality today, not sci-fi.

When will it be profitable? The carmakers are betting that L3 autonomy is a profitable investment, but robotaxis aren't. Regardless of what Waymo can or can't demonstrate technically. So either the carmakers are wrong or Waymo is. I guess we'll wait and see.

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

#309

Post by root_axis »

porphyra wrote: post #264
jefftk wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm very much aware of how Drive Pilot doesn't handle most cases: in my comment I described it as "super limited" and linked to where Mercedes describes the details. But within the range of cases where the Mercedes system is applicable (which recently went up to 59mph in Germany [1]) it's solidly better than the Tesla system because Mercedes did the engineering to make it reliable enough that you don't have to superv…

If Tesla were to artificially set up limitations like highway only, daytime, clearly visible lanes, good weather, car in front, no construction zones, no lane changes, etc, then they would easily have been able to offer full L3 and take full liability for it. Tesla FSD is practically perfected, with no accidents whatsoever, under such conditions already. But Elon wouldn't want to release this kind of gimped system as…

> Tesla FSD is practically perfected

Absolutely untrue. It's not even close to perfect. I use it a few times a week and while it's seen some significant improvements over the last year, it still makes pretty dangerous mistakes, especially on left turns, right-turn slip lanes, intersections with flashing yellow lights, streets with very worn road lines or where the positioning of the road lines shift from one side of the intersection to the other. I can think of a dozen other similar situations so I'm very sure there are many others I've never even encountered.

It remains to be seen how much juice Tesla can squeeze out of a transformer approach to autonomous driving, but it's by no means a sure thing.

edit: I misunderstood the comment. I see now that "practically perfected" is a reference to the ideal conditions mentioned in your first sentence.

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

#310

Post by nradov »

jcgrillo wrote: post #308
nradov wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But Waymo actually works? It's limited by geography and speed but they have robotaxis carrying paying customers in multiple cities. This is reality today, not sci-fi.

When will it be profitable? The carmakers are betting that L3 autonomy is a profitable investment, but robotaxis aren't. Regardless of what Waymo can or can't demonstrate technically. So either the carmakers are wrong or Waymo is. I guess we'll wait and see.

Well now you're asking a different question. Robotaxis clearly work today and are rapidly improving. Waymo is past the technical demonstration stage and has paying customers. Alphabet doesn't report profitability for that unit but it will probably take a number of years until they can drive down costs and achieve economies of scale. The senior leadership seems to be willing to fund this initiative indefinitely.

Several other carmakers beyond GM are still pursuing L4+ autonomous technology. So apparently they don't think Waymo is wrong, although they're way behind.

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