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.
GM exits robotaxi market, will bring Cruise operations in house
371–380 of 692 posts
Re: GM exits robotaxi market, will bring Cruise operations in house
#372> 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…
> It seems like drivers did not find the feature compelling and were not renewing. IMO, it's largely because BlueCruise (and all of the similar services) is not sufficiently better than the non-subscription driver assists. I have the option of BlueCruise on my vehicle and it's just not a compelling offer. * It only works on major highways. Beyond actual coverage, major highways are places where the standard driver as…
> it's just not a compelling offer
I drive (and have driven) a fair number of rental cars due to travel, and I have to say I feel that way about many new vehicles in their entirety. So much vehicle tech is at best unimpressive and at worst positively in my way as a driver.
> It's wickedly expensive
We own two cars, 6 and 10 years old respectively, yet I've never felt less motivated to look at new cars than I do now.
Guess our part towards saving the planet may well turn out to be 'driving that existing ICE vehicle for just a little bit longer'...
Re: GM exits robotaxi market, will bring Cruise operations in house
#373> 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…
> Strange that they would bow out. It does seem strange but when one considers that the CEO of one of these competitors spent ~$260M to help elect the next President and he will have his ear on matters of autonomous car regulation, maybe not so strange. If future autonomous car regulations are influenced by Musk and end up being lax and favour the technological approach that Tesla has taken, then GM/Cruise may have m…
100%.
To be clear, the "no longer relevant issue" is safety regulations designed to protect citizens from getting killed.
Re: GM exits robotaxi market, will bring Cruise operations in house
#374Sad 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.
my understanding is they lied to regulators. telling the truth is easy. lying is their fault.
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.
Re: GM exits robotaxi market, will bring Cruise operations in house
#375Peacetime 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.
Re: GM exits robotaxi market, will bring Cruise operations in house
#376Earlier 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…
This is so absurd. If they could accurately predict when their system is so reliable, they could get it certified for Level 3 use in these conditions. That's not a gimped version, that's strictly better than the product they offer.
They can't though. Mercedes-Benz can. To pretend that Tesla doesn't offer a better product because they don't want to is...
Re: GM exits robotaxi market, will bring Cruise operations in house
#377Earlier 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, with no accidents whatsoever, under such conditions already
Disengaging 2 seconds before an accident leads to a perfect driving record
Re: GM exits robotaxi market, will bring Cruise operations in house
#378Waymo 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.
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…
Tesla is a veeeeery distant second. Elon is full gung ho on vision only. They even removed ultrasonic sensors for parking. Tesla even removed radar. Vision only is Tesla’s bet.
Meanwhile Waymo bets on jamming the car full of sensors to ensure it has superhuman 360 perception in all conditions with multiple sensor redundancy. Waymo takes safety insanely seriously. Tesla doesn’t care if 100s die in their car while on FSD. Waymo doesn’t want to make cars or manage fleets. They want to purely focus on automating the driver end to end.
Unless Tesla has a magical perception algorithm breakthrough, Waymo may expand all US states that allow it, while Tesla won’t even get an operational robotaxi with 100+ rides per year.
Elon has tremendous success in SpaceX with falcon & starlink, that’s a fact. But Tesla FSD is so much hype compared to substance.
Re: GM exits robotaxi market, will bring Cruise operations in house
#379> 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 t…
The vehicle was equipped for Super Cruise. The feature is tied to a subscription account, and GM/the dealership do not provide subscriptions for showroom cars. After I wrote my comment, the dealership contacted me to say they had set up a demo subscription with GM for the vehicle if I wanted another test drive.
Re: GM exits robotaxi market, will bring Cruise operations in house
#380Earlier 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…
Tesla is a veeeeery distant second. Elon is full gung ho on vision only. They even removed ultrasonic sensors for parking. Tesla even removed radar. Vision only is Tesla’s bet. Meanwhile Waymo bets on jamming the car full of sensors to ensure it has superhuman 360 perception in all conditions with multiple sensor redundancy. Waymo takes safety insanely seriously. Tesla doesn’t care if 100s die in their car while on F…
Karpathy said in a recent podcast that they pre-train on LIDAR data so no, Tesla is not gung ho on no LIDAR. They "just" do transfer learning with inference on vision-only, which might be a great idea in the end.