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GM exits robotaxi market, will bring Cruise operations in house

cnbc.com

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

#61

Post by [deleted] »

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?

[deleted]

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

#62

Post by ketzo »

fixprix wrote: post #59
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 nothi…

Isn’t it kinda the other way around? I feel like the clock starts the first time a CyberCab gives a paid passenger ride, and that seems like quite a ways out — potentially much more than 2 years.

And Waymo has that whole time to bring down their costs of construction, learn how to solve problems of scale, and so on.

I agree that a CyberCab would have structural advantages if the service were at parity w/ Waymo, but that is a very big hypothetical!

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

#63

Post by fyrn_ »

fixprix wrote: post #59
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 nothi…

There is no proof that tesla can make FSD work with the level of safety they would need for a robitaxi service. Especially with camera only.

If they do pull that off, or are able pivot to a fused sensor architecture then I do think their hardware potential will make them a good competitor.

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

#64

Post by lowkey_ »

bfrog wrote: post #36

Yeah the robotaxi is a pipe dream grift. Humans are gross and nasty, I think some of these people need to do a ride along in a cab sometime in the winter in a busy poorly marked city on a Friday or Saturday night. Pray tell how the robot kicks passengers out or navigates the inevitable unexpected weather/human activity.

The past couple years, I've consistently used robotaxis whenever in SF. Definitely not a pipe dream.

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

#65

Post by jfoster »

bobthepanda wrote: post #33
throwaway48476 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

there's a significantly lower volume of taxis sold than personal cars sold, and if taxis got bigger in the way the self driving utopians foresaw, it would significantly cut into their personal car sales.

If taxis got bigger it would cut into personal sales, yes, but it creates a new revenue stream whereby they take a cut of every ride. The price anchor in that new revenue stream traditionally accounts for the cost of having a human driver, which a self-driving car doesn't need, so they would likely be off to a really good start in terms of profitability. Especially considering they have already paid for a significant amount of the R&D.

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

#66

Post by thr3000 »

Sad 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.

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

#67

Post by jedberg »

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…

And when you go to Tesla for a test drive, they first thing they do is shove it into auto-cruise or whatever they call it whether you want to or not! At least that is what happened to me when I test drove one 10 years ago. Maybe they don't do that anymore.

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

#68

Post by thr3000 »

fixprix wrote: post #59
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 nothi…

[flagged]

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

#69

Post by sidibe »

fixprix wrote: post #59
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 nothi…

Oh ye of little faith, why wait for cybercab when the model 3 was driving NY to LA driveway to driveway in 2018. Waymo died years ago

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

#70

Post by lateforwork »

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.

Right here in the US, this is how Bill Gates built Microsoft.
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