![Cruise autonomous taxi]()
General Motors backs out of self-driving taxi business
Instead, its Cruise "robotaxi" division will be merged into its Super Cruise hands-free driving development
Author of the article: Jil McIntosh
- General Motors will no longer fund Cruise, its majority-owned self-driving car division
- Instead, it will move forward with further development of its Super Cruise hands-free system
- Cruise's work will be merged into GM's internal assisted-driving tech team
General Motors isn't abandoning the idea of self-driving cars, but if you want one, you'll have to buy it, not hail it. The automaker is defunding its Cruise "robotaxi" development work, and merging it into its internal assisted-driving technology team. Instead of self-driving cabs, GM plans to simply move forward with its Super Cruise, its hands-free driving assist system that works on some 352,000 kilometres (218,000 miles) of pre-mapped highways in Canada and the U.S.
Cruise was an independent start-up, founded in San Francisco in 2013 to develop and test autonomous-vehicle technology. General Motors was on a roll when it acquired a majority interest in 2016; that year, it also formed a brand called Maven that would cover car-sharing fleets, and entered in to a strategic alliance with ride-hailing company Lyft.
GM also formed an internal Autonomous Vehicle Development Team, and Cruise operated as an independent unit within it. The original Cruise vehicle was built on the all-electric Chevrolet Bolt. In 2018, Honda acquired a stake in Cruise, and the two automakers planned to build the Cruise Origin together. It was a loaf-shaped, bus-style van that wouldn't have a steering wheel.
But the Cruise project didn't exactly cruise along. One of its cars crashed in 2022 in San Francisco, injuring two people; and later that year, after three other drivers banged into Cruise cars that apparently braked for no reason, the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) opened a probe into the incidents. In 2023, a driver struck a pedestrian and pushed her into the path of a Cruise, which continued to drag her and causing serious injuries.
Following that, California shut down Cruise's no-driver taxis, and Cruise voluntarily took its cars off the road in other cities. In June of 2024, it said it was going back on the road in Phoenix, Houston, and Dallas -- California hadn't lifted its ban -- but with "safety" drivers behind the wheel. A month later, citing the difficulty of meeting regulations with a vehicle that lacked driver controls, as well as how much the vehicle would ultimately cost to build, General Motors and Honda announced they'd abandoned the Cruise Origin project.
Read more HERE
General Motors backs out of the self-driving taxi business | Driving
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