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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

#451

Post by matthewmacleod »

Mashimo wrote: post #433
logifail wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you look at the lifecycle analysis of ICE cars, burning the fuel is the major contributor (Genuine question, not whataboutism...) what about the environmental aspects of manufacturing and distributing a vehicle other than CO2 emissions ? > old and set in their ways I fear I may be approaching this stage myself! :)

EVs have a way higher initial CO2 footprint. The crossover depends on car and where you get the energy from. I think it's often around the 100 000 km mark where an EV gets the smaller footprint. But like I said, many variables factor in.

As a straight-up random Google citation (https://www.cotes.com/blog/greenhouse-gas-emissions-from-ev-...)

Production of EVs and batteries generate more CO2 before the first wheel turns, however, the total carbon footprint of ICE vehicles quickly overtake that of the EVs after 15,000 miles (24,140 km) of driving.

- It takes a typical EV about one year in operation to achieve "carbon parity" with an ICE vehicle.

- If the EV draws electricity from a coal/fired grid, however, the catchup period stretches to more than five years.

- If the grid is powered by carbon/free hydroelectricity, the catchup period is about six months.

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

#452

Post by Wytwwww »

throwaway48476 wrote: post #24
Wytwwww wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's an entirely new market for them. They are struggling even in their core area of expertise and trying to compete against Waymo, Uber, Lyft etc. would be like flying to the moon for them.

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

#453

Post by Wytwwww »

floxy wrote: post #49
throwaway48476 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Car sales in the US go down every year and have since the 90s, were past peak car. They need to find a new market.

I'm not seeing that trend in this data: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TOTALSA ...maybe you are meaning something more specific?

It does still show that Americans are buying significantly less cars per capita than they did back in e.g. mid to late 80s. So the market is only stagnant because of population growth. Add Tesla and other companies that are making EVs and it doesn't look that great for GM anymore.

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

#454

Post by logifail »

lucianbr wrote: post #441
Mashimo wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EVs have a way higher initial CO2 footprint. The crossover depends on car and where you get the energy from. I think it's often around the 100 000 km mark where an EV gets the smaller footprint. But like I said, many variables factor in.

Is battery manufacturing that bad for the environment? I mean, ICE cars still have wheels, drivetrains, chassis, doors, windows, chairs, electronics, paint and many other things, same as the EVs. The electric motor I can't imagine its worse to produce than a combustion motor. So that leaves batteries as the cause of this huge disparity on day one, that takes 100,000km of fuel consumption to overtake. Is this with the…

> The electric motor I can't imagine its worse to produce than a combustion motor

I assumed we're attempting to weigh up keeping an ICE vehicle that already exists - like my 10 year old diesel - vs building building a new EV vehicle and scrapping the old ICE.

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

#455

Post by Gustomaximus »

chrischen wrote: post #334
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…

Being just behind #1 (Waymo) and deciding the market isn't big enough is not a good sign for the robo-taxi market.

I wouldn't take that as face value.

We know how big the taxi market is and it's growth rate. There is clearly room for a few businesses here alone. Then consider driverless will go beyond taxi to general transportation like trucking which is massive market. Also likely play a significant variable in what cars consumers choose.

I think the risk here is software tends to a winner (or small number of winners) gets all market.

That has to be a major risk/reward concern on the companies investing in this tech.

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

#456

Post by logifail »

matthewmacleod wrote: post #451
Mashimo wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EVs have a way higher initial CO2 footprint. The crossover depends on car and where you get the energy from. I think it's often around the 100 000 km mark where an EV gets the smaller footprint. But like I said, many variables factor in.

As a straight-up random Google citation ( https://www.cotes.com/blog/greenhouse-gas-emissions-from-ev-... ) Production of EVs and batteries generate more CO2 before the first wheel turns, however, the total carbon footprint of ICE vehicles quickly overtake that of the EVs after 15,000 miles (24,140 km) of driving. - It takes a typical EV about one year in operation to achieve "carbon parity" with an ICE vehicle. - If…

> the total carbon footprint of ICE vehicles quickly overtake that of the EVs after 15,000 miles (24,140 km) of driving

Shouldn't we be comparing an old ICE which was already built years ago but is still operating vs building a new EV to replace it?

The carbon footprint of building the ICE is almost irrelevant, it's just the ongoing damage it is doing. Compare that with footprint of building and operating the EV that could replace it.

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

#457

Post by eptcyka »

Mashimo wrote: post #433
logifail wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you look at the lifecycle analysis of ICE cars, burning the fuel is the major contributor (Genuine question, not whataboutism...) what about the environmental aspects of manufacturing and distributing a vehicle other than CO2 emissions ? > old and set in their ways I fear I may be approaching this stage myself! :)

EVs have a way higher initial CO2 footprint. The crossover depends on car and where you get the energy from. I think it's often around the 100 000 km mark where an EV gets the smaller footprint. But like I said, many variables factor in.

I seem to recall it being closer to 60’000km.

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

#458

Post by dkrich »

netcan wrote: post #424
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…

>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 Before the iPhone came out, some pretty decent/popular smartphones existed. I had clients in the industry. They sold a lot of n95s and such. But... data plans sucked. Apple did an exclusive deal and forced th…

The iPhone had enormous demonstrated demand

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

#459

Post by bradfa »

epolanski wrote: post #391
mingus88 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Hmmm, not when it comes to car. Salespeople are always trained on the latest features in the auto industry. Even if they don't get in person training, all carmakers release 1 hour long videos showing the features of their cars for training purposes.

I've bought a bunch of new cars in my life. I've never had a sales person who knew basically anything about the cars they were selling me. I have however had a variety of very good salespeople, their value has never been in explaining the car to me but in making my purchase transaction straight forward and reasonably quick.

All of the sales people could tell me how many doors each car had and what color it was when we stood next to it, but that was about it. Many of them could look up if other near-by dealers had the exact combination of options I wanted.

If sales person training about the actual cars exists, my experience indicates very few new car sales people take advantage of it.

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

#460

Post by whoitwas »

iknowstuff wrote: post #394
whoitwas wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If each car has someone piloting it because the tech can't do it, maybe the tech is the problem? I don't see how cameras can succeed. Sunlight and fog are constant and not practical to work around with visual data. I'm glad there's regulation keeping those lithium incendiaries piloted by people. People are bad enough at driving.

Evs catch on fire less than ICE. Sunlight is not a problem. High dynamic range cams

Let's pretend EV fires aren't exceptional. Sunlight certainly is a problem and you can see that in Tesla's own data.
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