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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

#51

Post by standardUser »

Animats wrote: post #35
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.

> Who else is even close to being able to provide it? Baidu/Apollo, maybe. There are deployed robo-taxis in China. Reviews of driving quality indicate "meh", they are sometimes directly teleoperated to get out of problems, and difficult intersections have fixed cameras the cars can see through.

From what I've read China is forging ahead very successfully, but I assume there would be a lot of friction if they tried to enter the US market, to say the least.

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

#52

Post by dilyevsky »

rmason wrote: post #46

Further proof that General Motors is run the finance types, not car guys. Wonder if they'd sell Cruise back to the founders for say a buck? Sure Cruise could then cut a deal with another auto maker. Maybe even get financing from one?

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

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

#53

Post by nitwit005 »

rmason wrote: post #46

Further proof that General Motors is run the finance types, not car guys. Wonder if they'd sell Cruise back to the founders for say a buck? Sure Cruise could then cut a deal with another auto maker. Maybe even get financing from one?

Surely the car guys are actually fans of driving?

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

#54

Post by Veserv »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #40
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.

Waymo hasn't left blood on the pavement. Cruise and Tesla have. As long as we're clutching our pearls and being overdramatic, how much blood have the humans left on the pavement in the meantime?

On a normalized basis in the USA? 1 fatality per ~4000-5000 years of driving. 1 injury per ~60-70 years of driving.

Can you point to scientifically rigorous evidence, at least reaching the bare minimum of fit for publication, of the absolute level of safety of those systems and where they stand in comparison?

How many people am I allowed to kill or injure before I need to run scientific studies on unproven and empirically fatal technology?

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

#55

Post by standardUser »

schiffern wrote: post #39
standardUser wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Waymo's strategy traded "do robotaxi early" in exchange for big penalties in cost-per-car (LIDAR) and cost-per-city (requirement for millimeter mapping). Yes it gets them early service in a small number of cities, but it dramatically kneecaps their ability to scale to the entire planet.

No doubt the one-time costs are staggering, but I've read the cost per car is only around $100k. That's a lot more than the $20-$50k for a new Uber or taxi, but the potential savings in labor are massive and create the potential to severely undercut the (manual) competition.

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

#56

Post by Grazester »

lsaferite wrote: post #42
Animats wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember what happened to the Google employee who tried to leave and take some of the technology with him.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Levandowski

There's leaving with what's in your head and there's M. Levandowski. Very different things.

...So he wrote down a few notes and tried to take them with him -sarcasm-

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

#58

Post by dgfitz »

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?

I think the brave throwaway48476 doesn’t have a source.

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

#59

Post by fixprix »

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.

I don't see how Waymo is going to survive the onslaught that is CyberCab. Cheaper to build and operate, more efficient, much faster to build, and deployable across all cities without any manual configuration. The clock is ticking on Waymo, they have 2 years to figure out how to compete otherwise they're cooked.

It's very similar to legacy space and internet, the existing players saw SpaceX coming years out, did nothing and got crushed.

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

#60

Post by acchow »

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.

Probably China will always outpay Cruise so you see migration from Waymo to Chinese companies, but not to cruise
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