> 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 out.
Small anecdote: I visited a GM dealership this week and the salesperson told me Super 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.
Ford just lowered the cost of its BlueCruise subscription by 1/3rd. In an earnings call eight months prior they remarked they made a 70% margin on the service. It seems like drivers did not find the feature compelling and were not renewing. Interest in autonomous driving appears to be cooling across the board.
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'...
I’ve had a Yukon with supercruise for 18 months. It is fantastic for highway driving, particularly, we’ve driven it west from Tennessee to Colorado and Florida. Other comments claiming it’s the same as other standard driver-assist packages are incorrect. Totally hands free, no “ping pong” with the lanes.
That said, when trying to BUY a supercruise vehicle, the sales guys were clueless, I had to review the stat sheets of each car to see which ones did or did not have it. GM is treating this technology as “surveys say 2% of the market wants a self driving vehicle” (incorrect question) compared to “install on every vehicle as an available subscription, let the sales team earn their way.” I’m sure the tech is expensive, but it can’t be that much more at the OEM level.
I also have a Tesla with FSD. FSD is truly amazing but still struggles with edge cases like, my office has two entrances, one is blocked by barrels, it tries to turn into the barrels every time.
From my understanding, super cruise only works on pre-approved roads/road sections, whereas FSD works just about anywhere. When I last checked my commute to work, the main highway I take becomes unsupported half way to work, despite it being the same bland typical highway layout.
I really don't want to buy a Tesla, but from what I can tell, nobody has anything close to what FSD offers.
> Small anecdote: I visited a GM dealership this week and the salesperson told me Super 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.
Sadly this is believable, I've asked to check out things like remote start and control of heating/cooling, and the sales people cannot show those features off because they require an app + subscription tied to the car.
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 fancy new feature they can’t control
The whole dealership system is parasitic, rentseeking, friction. Tesla might have a point here.
Instead of transparently selling a product for fixed price, the dealer system appears based on information asymmetry, haggling, upcharges, finance bullshit, warranty bullshit, subscription bullshit, and many decades of entrenched psyops culture against customers.
On top of that, salespeople are often poorly trained on the products and dealerships seem to have an adversarial relationship with corporate, especially around the corporate website differing from the local story.
And then the dealerships steer you for whatever benefits them. In 2017 I tried to test drive a Chevy Bolt: Motortrend's car of that year. One dealer hadn't even heard of it. Another said he couldn't get one. Another tried to dissuade me from looking at it by dissing the product. Finally I found a knowledgeable dealer that knew the product, had some, and revealed they were easy for all dealers to get in our area: the others were just being obstreperous. Suck.
Brad Templeton's Robotaxi Timeline[1] (October 2024) shows a dozen milestones that Waymo has achieved over nearly 15 years from "Make a nice video" to "100,000 Rides per week." Waymo needs two more milestones to achieve "Production!" Waymo's competitors are behind on the timeline, but may move faster thanks to improved technology and a more welcoming social environment.
GM hasn’t been a car company since the 1980s. It’s a finance operation. Leadership only cares about developing products that are good enough to sell financing.
They really don’t know how to develop a compelling product, even though they have an enormous amount of experience and engineering talent.
It’s very similar to the failure of Boeing but GM doesn’t make anything that can kill 200 people at once so we don’t notice.
I’m one of the people that did not renew BlueCruise and the reason is kind of weird
BlueCruise vehicles were updated with the most sophisticated driver attention system ive ever seen. It will complain in less time than it takes me to change a radio station.
Before that update, I was enjoying the automated driving a little bit too much, and using it to take liberties with my attention in the car. That was awesome as a user experience.
After the update, I am paying more attention to the road than I did when I was driving a manual. There is no benefit to being able to take my hands off the steering wheel. That’s a good thing for safety, but it means that “level 2.5” driving (or whatever) adds zero marginal utility.
Ford brags that BlueCruise gets top marks from Consumer Reports but I think it's mostly because of because of this driver monitoring, rather than actual driving performance.
> Starting with 2024 model-year vehicles, we will deduct points if an [active driving assistance] system doesn’t have adequate [direct driver monitoring systems]. Right now, only Ford and GM’s systems meet our criteria for earning additional points, but others could be available soon. ...
> Ford’s BlueCruise sets a high standard among [active driving assistance] systems, aided by an infrared camera that monitors the driver’s eyes to determine whether they are looking at the road. If the driver glances away from the road for more than about 5 second... the system will give the driver a visual warning and an audible chime.
Supercruise might be comparable to Tesla's "Autosteer" product but its incomparable to Tesla's paid "FSD Supervised" product. The latter is closer to a Waymo or Cruise than it is to a Mercedes or GM driver assist.
> The latter is closer to a Waymo or Cruise than it is to a Mercedes or GM driver assist.
It depends how you look at it, but in the (super limited) cases where you can use Mercedes Drive Pilot you can legally and safely read a book, watch a movie, or work while in the driver's seat. [1] That's not the case with any Tesla product.
I thought supercruise only worked on "qualified roads".
Tesla autopilot 1.0 has been around on tesla since 2015. It's actually pretty good on the freeway as traffic aware cruise control + autosteer. I think it's a pretty good balance of driver + assist.
Are we forgetting that this only happened because they got in huge trouble with regulators and had to withdraw their cars from the street for like a year? I wouldn't take their statement at complete face value and don't see any reason for pessimism for Waymo.
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.
>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 them to include 2gb of data. They could not sell phones with data-less plans. Customers could not buy iphones on data-less plans.
> Interest in autonomous driving appears to be cooling across the board.
I've had one Tesla for 6 years, another for 2: I've gotten to a point where I find Autopilot boring and turn it off just for something to do.
My older Tesla has enhanced Autopilot. As impressive as it is, it's very glitchy. I primarily use it so I don't speed.
Because enhanced autopilot was so glitchy, when we added a 2nd Tesla to the household, we didn't pay for FSD. (Enhanced autopilot was too expensive given how glitchy it was in my older car.) The free trials of FSD in the 2nd Tesla are impressive... And glitchy. I constantly need to take over on surface roads; but it is very nice on freeways.
The thing is, "self driving" as a feature just isn't worth the sticker price. If you're sitting in the driver's seat, and there's nothing to do, you can just save yourself a boatload of cash and drive the car yourself. Especially if you have to remain alert at all times, the best way to cut the boredom is to drive the car.
self driving makes total sense if its the sci-fi like dream of being able to read the news or a novel in the drivers seat while your car safely takes you to your destination.
But if I have to maintain a hand on the steering wheel and monitor the car I may as well be driving.
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.
> Small anecdote: I visited a GM dealership this week and the salesperson told me Super 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.
That was a your-dealership issue, not a GM issue. GM doesn't run the dealerships (though they sure have plenty of influence).
I test drove the Silverado EV a month ago and got to try out super cruise.
That's a "GM's business model" problem, which is again a GM problem.
The top-selling EV maker in the US doesn't have any dealerships, so clearly it's not an insurmountable problem. GM just hasn't prioritized surmounting it.
An reasonable alternative would be for GM to have a "dealer license" mode for qualified dealers (for example, training), where they can get it enabled until the sale is complete.
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 made significant irrelevant investments to solve issues that are no longer relevant, and this puts them on poor footing in the new competitive landscape.
It's possible they're bowing out early on the assumption that this will no longer be a competition that they can win.
Maybe in some small parts of the country. Tesla is dominating most everywhere else in the US. I definitely have no access to a Waymo but have been driven by FSD in heavy construction. (Do not own a Tesla myself).
It's not a regulatory issue. There is no federal rule requiring automakers to sell through franchised dealers. Some states have such laws. In other states the automakers have voluntarily entered into contractual agreements that prevent them from competing with their franchised dealers.
It's weird to me to see so many people thinking Tesla is "far behind", when in reality, they're far, far ahead of the competition for a general purpose and scalable self driving solution. Seems like political biases just cloud judgement so much. Youtube now has videos comparing Tesla FSD V13 with Waymo rides on the same routes.
I tried both extensively (have the full FSD package on my Model 3). FSD still feels suicidal in a good day, plain incapable on average.
I can’t imagine how someone would compare it to a multi-sensor setup - a single camera can’t match the level of prescience a Waymo or Cruise have. But also as the overall experience is just absurdly different. Waymo was the first tech thing I felt was truly magical in _decades_.
Meanwhile the best I can get out of Tesla FSD is straight highways. And even there, there’s random glitches (the forever annoying ghost braking being the one that makes me feel particularly unsafe with it)
There are (crappy, dangerous-seeming) genuine full autonomous-assuming-you-don't-count-remote-safety-drivers Waymos on the street where I live, in volume, for a while now.
Tesla's equivalent system appears to be 100% vaporware. I don't understand the case for them not being far behind.
"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 telling you how to enable it. (some people are still quite afraid of giving full control over to computers)
I have tested numerous vehicles with Super Cruise; I quite enjoyed it.
I could be wrong, but unless it's a new GM rule, afaik, and with my understanding of how dealerships work (as far as the ones I've visited), dealerships try to avoid messing with the vehicle programming as much as they can. It's rather sad, as aside from the manufactures, dealerships have the most tools and access to the vehicles programming, but rarely-if-ever stray from the service manual.
Custom programming kind of is a market for that reason.
Living in a state with a very large automotive industry, there are a lot of people who have the tools + knowledge that offer custom programming services like: Programming the key fob that if one was to hold the unlock-door button for 5 seconds, the driver side window opens. And if the lock button is pressed once, then held for 5 seconds, all the windows are rolled up. Enabling a bunch of different video codecs/formats and enabling video-playback while the car is in motion if the passenger seat detects something siting there, etc, etc...
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.
This seems like an industry wide admission that this stuff doesn't actually work, tbh. I've heard similar things from Farley at Ford--advanced lane keeping cruise control systems work, robotaxis don't. Only the "tech" companies are so committed as to double down and try to wish this sci-fi into reality. The car companies are a little more grounded in reality.
But Waymo actually works? It's limited by geography and speed but they have robotaxis carrying paying customers in multiple cities. This is reality today, not sci-fi.
> the salesperson told me Super Cruise was not enabled for test drives
I wonder if this is a liability thing (driver would be responsible).
Or it could suck and the chances of buying the car go down.
I remember walking into an apple store and seeing the apple vision pro headset. I asked to try it, and they said "you can't. You have to make an appointment and blah blah". If someone adds friction to the buying process, there must be some reason - they must be hiding something (poor performance, complexity, price, etc)
Super cruise started out as high definition maps of US highways that GM made themselves. At the time (around 2018/19) they were using mobile eye’s technology/SOCs and integrating it into their vehicles. Cruise was operating as a completely separate unit and nothing was shared.
GM later had a PR release for UltraCruise which was supposedly developed in house and maybe that uses Cruise technology. However, AFAIK it was never released and is rumored to be shelved.
Reminds me of my father in law's experience with Toyota (I think). The car's nav system had an update available on a CD you put into the car stereo. The dealership made him order one, instead of the much more reasonable loaning him one.
Cruise and GM Supercruise/ultracruise share nothing except the names and a VP somewhere inside GM. Entirely separate organizations and tech, at least the last time I had any knowledge of the matter.
Yeah and neither of them is close to FSD in capabilities lol. Super Cruise/Ultra Cruise is a brittle highway-only thing, only available in a handful of $200k+ GM cars, that works by localizing to a detailed lidar map of some interstate routes.
> 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.
Just edited to add it in. Wikipedia says they're not going into production until 2027 though, and unlike the others I don't think they're operating in any markets.
For reference:
"Ford BlueCruise is a hands-free driving assistance feature that allows drivers to take their hands off the wheel on certain preapproved roads"
"It seems like drivers did not find the feature compelling and were not renewing. Interest in autonomous driving appears to be cooling across the board."
No, because BlueCruise sounds like an asinine feature. To make me pay $2450 more for a car for some arbitrary selection roads for that feature to be available doesn't make sense to me.
Cruise really was on to something, well w/e GM's loss!
BlueCruise is a legitimate incremental improvement over more limited driver assistance systems. It clearly has some value to some drivers. But an extra $2450 is tough to swallow on a mainstream brand when middle-class consumers are already struggling to afford a new car. In a few years Ford will probably just bundle it in with common option packages.
> Interest in autonomous driving appears to be cooling across the board.
My pet theory is that it really took off because a bunch of investors were hoping to capture and capitalize on the baby boomers aging out of being able to easily drive themselves. They tried to speed up technological advancements in order to meet that window of a large more-affluent cohort of potential customers.
So it might be interesting to somehow plot total "self driving" investment against that kind of customer base projection over time.
Interesting theory but I think the investment issues are simpler, and non-revenue producing business models simply don't make sense outside of the window of the low interest rate years.
> were hoping to capture and capitalize on the baby boomers aging out of being able to easily drive themselves. They tried to speed up technological advancements in order to meet that window of a large more-affluent cohort of potential customers.
That's still a huge market. And the baby boomers are the most affluent demographic in the western world.
I just bought a new Mustang, and from what I can tell it's total junk.
Many others on forums report the same, and here's an example of a component being borked.
AEB, Automatic Emergency Braking, is on by default and always turns back on at vehicle start.
It's dangerous. An example? Even with a camera and a separate radar, it is borked. I've been behind another car, slowing for a light, and hit a downward slope of a large speedbump and SLAM the brakes come on.
Why?
The radar suddenly sees pavement, as the nose of the car is pointed down, but the camera sees car + brake light ahead.
This is at 30km/hr, and everyone is braking fine, the car ahead is not even close. And proof it's not me is the 5 times it happened in 2 weeks, it was always something like this.
I was almost hit 3 times.
It literally panic brakes. Horribly designed.
I finally had it and removed the radar sensor with forscan.
With behaviour like this in something as simple as AEB, by no means would I trust anytiong else. Forums show people complaining about:
* adaptive cruise slowing down, or speeding up because it sees speed limit signs on offramps, or even adjacent roads
* the lane assist pulling strongly because the car thinks an offramp is the main road.
* reports of swerving into other lanes when passing some vehicles, the car confused
It's just junk.
This beta testing on our roads needs to stop.
What cracks me up is this.
If you asked a skilled software dev, if they'd prefer to have software designed by a team, any team, responsible for tgeir life? They'd likely say no.
Because we've all seen the crappy code that gets produced. We know of bugs. We know of failures in testing, automated or not.
These cars ae all extremely buggy, just as any software project is. But beyond that, auto manufacturers are notorious for cutting corners.
I just can't imagine why anyone, this decade, would want to trust auto drive anything.
I cease to understand how the average HN commentator doesn’t see Tesla as the leader in this space, and my only guess is all the FUD media around them.
If you have a Tesla, you know that it’s far and above the best driver-assist software in the entire market, and next place isn’t even close.
Sure FSD isn’t Waymo, but it’s entirely different tech and it can drive infinitely more places than the two cities Waymo supports.
V13.2 is probably close to 1000 miles per critical intervention now. Geofence it, avoid stupidly dangerous UPLs and fix some map issues and they're already on par with Waymo. Next version has 3x the number of parameters and 3x context length. If you know anything about scaling laws you wouldn't be betting on Waymo right now.
Lidar obstacle detection algorithm from a Git repo leaked onto Tor
This is a drivable region mapping (obstacle detection) algorithm found in what appears to be a git repo leaked from an autonomous vehicle company in 2017. The repo was available through one or more Tor hidden services for several years.
The lidar code appears to be written for the Velodyne HDL-32E. It operates in a series of stages, each stage refining the output of the previous stage. This algorithm is in the second stage. It is the primary obstacle detection method, with the other methods making only small improvements.
The leaked code uses a column-major matrix of points and it explicitly handles NaNs (the no-return points). We've rewritten it to use a much more cache-efficient row-major matrix layout and a conditional that will ignore the NaN points without explicit testing.
This is an amazingly effective method of obstacle detection, considering its simplicity.
Is there any indication this object detection algo was originally from Cruise? The linked code has been rewritten and has no attribution beyond "an autonomous vehicle company".
Fun fact - Cruise did actually have a source code leak a few years back, some engineer decided to embrace the 4 hour work week and outsource their role to a contractor, who uploaded their work to a public github repo (I assume this was accidental and they intended to make a private repo). But it was not core AV code.
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 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 timelines. In theory Tesla could say they will deploy in X city, talk with the local government to get necessary approvals, and get it going after a few test drives. Thats the tail, anyway. With that kind of go to market speed you can start acquiring customers pretty easily and start scaling up the business. Its basically the typical SaaS setup - cut some corners for market share and become the defacto player in it after some time.
I wouldn't write them out purely out of spite. Their solution is the most conducive to scaling laws, on the ML, operations, and business side.
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.
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.
There’s no evidence that this is even going to be a viable business model, commercially or technically. There’s no “moat” around it or obvious first mover advantage. It seems very early to worry about competition.
a) Early technology adopters are more forgiving of minor problems and are your free word-of-mouth marketers. The company benefits from lowered GTM costs.
b) Fast, reliable service depends on density; there needs to be enough cars on the road that there's always one available within a few minutes when you open the app; users will develop a habit of choosing whichever provider is reliably faster and that habit will become ingrained, making market entry for later movers more costly. First movers also have the advantage of their early adopters helping pay for their fleet as it's built up; later movers have to flood new markets with subsidized capacity to get to equivalent density. That works (Uber did it for rideshare) but it's expensive. So again: lower GTM costs.
Regarding whether this will be a viable market - Lyft/Uber have already demonstrated there's tons of demand for on-demand transportation services, and Waymo in SF is already very popular. One can back-of-the-envelope whether the economics work but generally speaking any time you replace labor with automation in a large market, it does.
In the long run though you're right that there isn't a moat that can't be solved with massive capital investment. But you could say the same about many markets; turns out one can have a successful company within a competitive market the old fashioned way.. by just being really good. It's harder, but it works.
I mean Waymo already has competitors, Uber, Lyft, and regular taxis. Right now Uber and Lyft are typically strategically priced to be slightly cheaper than taxis are but I think Uber has enough margin to cut costs to compete with Waymo as they enter more markets, and Waymo needs to get people on board to make robotaxis a real thing people use and to offset their dev costs.
Waymo is also in competition with non AV ride sharing companies. They'll need to make it more cost effective and/or (continue to) deliver higher quality rides
> 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.
I’ve taken a few dozen Waymo rides, but it doesn’t matger because this is not something you can really test as a person. The entire issue is whether you have, say, 7 or 9 nines of reliability (e.g., 10x or 0.1x times more dangerous than a human), and you can’t extrapolate that from how smooth it feels or whatever. FSD doesn’t have that reliability, which is why they don’t let you sleep.
Yes, I have, it's been than anything else out there and it's not even close. There was never a moment in time that Waymo was not a distant leader despite how competitors wanted to appear.
Tesla hasn't even launched a pilot program. Cruise has actual commercial road hours logged and Waymo has a fully operational commercial service that keeps expanding. Tesla has a LOT of catching up to do. Cities won't just let them launch a service on a whim. It's going to take years to catch up.
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.
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!
Am I living in a bubble or is much of the excitement behind autonomous cabs just hype? Like, sure, it will be popular, but the way some folks(and not just Tesla zealots) talk about it, it will be 25% of global GDP.
Beyond, idk, saving my relatives the task of driving me to the airport, I don't see my family using an autonomous taxi at all. I think I'm like many Americans in that I like my personal vehicle because it's mine. I'm comfy in it, it's filled with only my stank, and I have tailored it to my liking.
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?
GM is is making 12 billion a year of profit though. It seems like madness to cut Cruise unless there is no hope of it ever working or making a profit… The only U.S. competitor besides Waymo that’s seemingly remotely in the ballpark is Zoox.
GM’s current annual expenditure on Cruise amounted to about $2 billion, and the restructuring would cut that by more than half, CFO Paul Jacobson said.
GM braces for a $5 billion hit as it fights to keep up in China’s intensifying EV price war
SAIC-GM revealed in a regulatory filing on Wednesday (via The New York Times) that it expects to write down between $2.6 billion and $2.9 billion in the fourth quarter. The automaker is also expecting another $2.7 billion in restructuring expenses.
GM has a minority ownership at 49%, so I expect that SAIC is taking an even bigger hit? Reading the article, it seems like SAIC-GM is taking the hit, not GM, so divide those losses/expenses in half and that is the effect on GM
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 what I think GM's original plan was for acquiring Cruise — using their tech for passenger cars. Selling cars is GM's bread and butter. This wasn't going to end any other way.
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.
considering humans leave oceans of blood in their wake with their own driving, all of the autonomous driving companies are doing great by your measurement of success
I took cruise at least a dozen times, back when they were giving free rides from downtown SF late at night, originally advertised as a promotion for restaurant and hospitality workers going home. (I was just hacking late into the night ;) I lived on the other side of town, so it was about a 6 mile trip.
I can't speak to their technology, but generally speaking Cruise seemed too cautious, both in the aggressiveness of the driving, and in how quickly the company capitulated. I've taken Waymo a few times and what stands out to me is how aggressive Waymo cars are. As a passenger this aggressiveness makes them feel more sophisticated, not to mention faster, but the cars also spook pedestrians to a greater extent as they nose their way into traffic or through turns. Nonetheless, Waymo has been more adept at moving past bad publicity than Cruise, including in the face of accidents.
Above and beyond whatever technological shortcomings there may have been[1], I think there was a management and business development mismatch between GM and Cruise. Cruise manifestly worked well enough. With better management--more honest, but also more aggressive--it could have been a contender; heck, it was (is?) the onlyproven competitor to Waymo for autonomous public taxi service, at least in the U.S.
[1] In 3 Waymo trips remote intervention was required once, which is a comparable ratio to my Cruise trips.
That would require paying more than competitors and that’s unacceptable to anyone except for the successful companies that commonly do just this.
I’m serious about this point too. Eg. Intel pays less than half of what tsmc in Taiwan pays for similar jobs on a ppp basis after 20years of wage freezes and cuts at intel. They can’t poach any talent and investors want more layoffs and wage freezes next quarter to fix the decline they see. GM is similar. It’s not going to turn around and start competing in the high end labor market reasonably. It can’t. The big shareholders would sack the ceo in seconds. Think GM could ever compete with Google (Waymo) in a market where ai engineers can earn ) 1m/yr? Ha! The MBAs wouldn’t allow it for a second.
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).
There was so much noise about autonomous vehicles in SF from first responders and other officials. There was a segment that dismissed this as histrionics about self-driving cars.
As soon as Cruise closed up shop, the complaints went way down.
My fav was when a bus driver killed a pedestrian but Muni blamed Cruise for his death because it was allegedly blocking responders. They managed to completely shift media blame from bus drivers to evil robocars.
Some it could also be cold math of expected gains vs expected losses. The expected gains are growing slowly, but the major blunder of last year has made the expected losses skyrocket.
Pretty bad news for the space as a whole. A decade and a half ago there were a dozen+ companies and tens of billions of VC dollars in the space. People were proudly proclaiming the end of driving. Now all but one of them have folded.
My thoughts today are the same as they were back then. Self driving will only be solved city by city and street by street. Local governments will need to create dedicated closed-off autonomous lanes with sensors. Auto manufacturers will need to abide by a common standard to talk to local infrastructure and to each other.
Instead we chose to solve the problem in the most complex and inefficient way possible, and are now seeing the results.
If you're going to block off lanes and install sensors why not just lay track and use streetcars? Rail is way more efficient. This has been a solved problem for the better part of two centuries.
That's like asking why do cars and roads exist at all when everyone can just use public transit.
The answer is that people want cars. They want to drive. They want to be taken directly from point A to point B without needing to walk to transit stops and switch buses/trains and face unpredictable schedules and delays.
Autonomous road infrastructure is a sensible, incremental improvement. And in fact city buses will tend to benefit from it the most.
As much as I love urban rail, its usefulness scales in direct proportion to population density. Europe has >2x the population density of the US. Japan has 10x the population density of the US. Rail for transit just doesn't make as much sense for the US. It works in a few of our densest cities, but nowhere else. Buses are cheaper, simpler, and easier than rail, but also are useful in proportion to density.
Streetcar rails are terrible for bikes and pedestrians. Dedicated bus lanes are a lot more flexible. A rail car is probably more efficient than a bus, but a bus is a lot less expensive.
That could also mean that one company just won, right? Ten companies try to do a really hard thing, nine fail, one succeeds, the nine failures close down.
With world models like Genie 2 and other advances in LMMs (large multimodal models), the aspiration of human-level autonomous vehicles might be realized relatively soon.
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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 out.
Small anecdote: I visited a GM dealership this week and the salesperson told me Super 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.
Ford just lowered the cost of its BlueCruise subscription by 1/3rd. In an earnings call eight months prior they remarked they made a 70% margin on the service. It seems like drivers did not find the feature compelling and were not renewing. Interest in autonomous driving appears to be cooling across the board.
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 assists already work extremely well.
* It does nothing about traffic around you. You have to be prepared to react. Not much different than driver assist.
* It's wickedly expensive.
Right now, radar assisted cruise and camera based lane centering eases 95% of my driving fatigue.
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'...
That said, when trying to BUY a supercruise vehicle, the sales guys were clueless, I had to review the stat sheets of each car to see which ones did or did not have it. GM is treating this technology as “surveys say 2% of the market wants a self driving vehicle” (incorrect question) compared to “install on every vehicle as an available subscription, let the sales team earn their way.” I’m sure the tech is expensive, but it can’t be that much more at the OEM level.
I also have a Tesla with FSD. FSD is truly amazing but still struggles with edge cases like, my office has two entrances, one is blocked by barrels, it tries to turn into the barrels every time.
I really don't want to buy a Tesla, but from what I can tell, nobody has anything close to what FSD offers.
Sadly this is believable, I've asked to check out things like remote start and control of heating/cooling, and the sales people cannot show those features off because they require an app + subscription tied to the car.
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 fancy new feature they can’t control
Instead of transparently selling a product for fixed price, the dealer system appears based on information asymmetry, haggling, upcharges, finance bullshit, warranty bullshit, subscription bullshit, and many decades of entrenched psyops culture against customers.
On top of that, salespeople are often poorly trained on the products and dealerships seem to have an adversarial relationship with corporate, especially around the corporate website differing from the local story.
And then the dealerships steer you for whatever benefits them. In 2017 I tried to test drive a Chevy Bolt: Motortrend's car of that year. One dealer hadn't even heard of it. Another said he couldn't get one. Another tried to dissuade me from looking at it by dissing the product. Finally I found a knowledgeable dealer that knew the product, had some, and revealed they were easy for all dealers to get in our area: the others were just being obstreperous. Suck.
I would walk away if I saw that.
[1] https://www.templetons.com/brad/robocars/timeline.html
They really don’t know how to develop a compelling product, even though they have an enormous amount of experience and engineering talent.
It’s very similar to the failure of Boeing but GM doesn’t make anything that can kill 200 people at once so we don’t notice.
Global-wise, there are also a few Chinese companies in the robotaxi market. Pony.ai and WeRide both recently went in public market.
Not yet with customers, but in the testing phase.
BlueCruise vehicles were updated with the most sophisticated driver attention system ive ever seen. It will complain in less time than it takes me to change a radio station.
Before that update, I was enjoying the automated driving a little bit too much, and using it to take liberties with my attention in the car. That was awesome as a user experience.
After the update, I am paying more attention to the road than I did when I was driving a manual. There is no benefit to being able to take my hands off the steering wheel. That’s a good thing for safety, but it means that “level 2.5” driving (or whatever) adds zero marginal utility.
> Starting with 2024 model-year vehicles, we will deduct points if an [active driving assistance] system doesn’t have adequate [direct driver monitoring systems]. Right now, only Ford and GM’s systems meet our criteria for earning additional points, but others could be available soon. ...
> Ford’s BlueCruise sets a high standard among [active driving assistance] systems, aided by an infrared camera that monitors the driver’s eyes to determine whether they are looking at the road. If the driver glances away from the road for more than about 5 second... the system will give the driver a visual warning and an audible chime.
It depends how you look at it, but in the (super limited) cases where you can use Mercedes Drive Pilot you can legally and safely read a book, watch a movie, or work while in the driver's seat. [1] That's not the case with any Tesla product.
[1] https://www.mbusa.com/en/owners/manuals/drive-pilot
Tesla autopilot 1.0 has been around on tesla since 2015. It's actually pretty good on the freeway as traffic aware cruise control + autosteer. I think it's a pretty good balance of driver + assist.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hv9HtWUf27s
Arguably this is Waymo in its "home turf"
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.
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 them to include 2gb of data. They could not sell phones with data-less plans. Customers could not buy iphones on data-less plans.
At some point you have to nudge the paradigm.
I've had one Tesla for 6 years, another for 2: I've gotten to a point where I find Autopilot boring and turn it off just for something to do.
My older Tesla has enhanced Autopilot. As impressive as it is, it's very glitchy. I primarily use it so I don't speed.
Because enhanced autopilot was so glitchy, when we added a 2nd Tesla to the household, we didn't pay for FSD. (Enhanced autopilot was too expensive given how glitchy it was in my older car.) The free trials of FSD in the 2nd Tesla are impressive... And glitchy. I constantly need to take over on surface roads; but it is very nice on freeways.
The thing is, "self driving" as a feature just isn't worth the sticker price. If you're sitting in the driver's seat, and there's nothing to do, you can just save yourself a boatload of cash and drive the car yourself. Especially if you have to remain alert at all times, the best way to cut the boredom is to drive the car.
But if I have to maintain a hand on the steering wheel and monitor the car I may as well be driving.
Today, I think they should do this. It is rare I need to touch the wheel or pedal these days and people should experience it.
That was a your-dealership issue, not a GM issue. GM doesn't run the dealerships (though they sure have plenty of influence).
I test drove the Silverado EV a month ago and got to try out super cruise.
The top-selling EV maker in the US doesn't have any dealerships, so clearly it's not an insurmountable problem. GM just hasn't prioritized surmounting it.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/18/cars/china-baidu-apollo-go-ro...
That doesn't sound like it's nearly at par.
I'd love to see some direct safety comparison stats.
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 made significant irrelevant investments to solve issues that are no longer relevant, and this puts them on poor footing in the new competitive landscape.
It's possible they're bowing out early on the assumption that this will no longer be a competition that they can win.
To be clear, the "no longer relevant issue" is safety regulations designed to protect citizens from getting killed.
Yes. I think GM leadership has finally learned enough to realize how far behind they are.
I can’t imagine how someone would compare it to a multi-sensor setup - a single camera can’t match the level of prescience a Waymo or Cruise have. But also as the overall experience is just absurdly different. Waymo was the first tech thing I felt was truly magical in _decades_.
Meanwhile the best I can get out of Tesla FSD is straight highways. And even there, there’s random glitches (the forever annoying ghost braking being the one that makes me feel particularly unsafe with it)
Tesla's equivalent system appears to be 100% vaporware. I don't understand the case for them not being far behind.
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 telling you how to enable it. (some people are still quite afraid of giving full control over to computers)
I have tested numerous vehicles with Super Cruise; I quite enjoyed it.
I could be wrong, but unless it's a new GM rule, afaik, and with my understanding of how dealerships work (as far as the ones I've visited), dealerships try to avoid messing with the vehicle programming as much as they can. It's rather sad, as aside from the manufactures, dealerships have the most tools and access to the vehicles programming, but rarely-if-ever stray from the service manual.
Custom programming kind of is a market for that reason.
Living in a state with a very large automotive industry, there are a lot of people who have the tools + knowledge that offer custom programming services like: Programming the key fob that if one was to hold the unlock-door button for 5 seconds, the driver side window opens. And if the lock button is pressed once, then held for 5 seconds, all the windows are rolled up. Enabling a bunch of different video codecs/formats and enabling video-playback while the car is in motion if the passenger seat detects something siting there, etc, etc...
I wonder if this is a liability thing (driver would be responsible).
Or it could suck and the chances of buying the car go down.
I remember walking into an apple store and seeing the apple vision pro headset. I asked to try it, and they said "you can't. You have to make an appointment and blah blah". If someone adds friction to the buying process, there must be some reason - they must be hiding something (poor performance, complexity, price, etc)
GM later had a PR release for UltraCruise which was supposedly developed in house and maybe that uses Cruise technology. However, AFAIK it was never released and is rumored to be shelved.
The facts don't matter anymore.
Just perception.
I think you mean interest in level 3 autonomous driving appears to be cooling across the board
That's the one the press release is referring to, I guarantee it.
I just spit up my drink. Thank you for that.
Waymo isn't scalable.
"It seems like drivers did not find the feature compelling and were not renewing. Interest in autonomous driving appears to be cooling across the board."
No, because BlueCruise sounds like an asinine feature. To make me pay $2450 more for a car for some arbitrary selection roads for that feature to be available doesn't make sense to me.
Cruise really was on to something, well w/e GM's loss!
My pet theory is that it really took off because a bunch of investors were hoping to capture and capitalize on the baby boomers aging out of being able to easily drive themselves. They tried to speed up technological advancements in order to meet that window of a large more-affluent cohort of potential customers.
So it might be interesting to somehow plot total "self driving" investment against that kind of customer base projection over time.
That's still a huge market. And the baby boomers are the most affluent demographic in the western world.
Many others on forums report the same, and here's an example of a component being borked.
AEB, Automatic Emergency Braking, is on by default and always turns back on at vehicle start.
It's dangerous. An example? Even with a camera and a separate radar, it is borked. I've been behind another car, slowing for a light, and hit a downward slope of a large speedbump and SLAM the brakes come on.
Why?
The radar suddenly sees pavement, as the nose of the car is pointed down, but the camera sees car + brake light ahead.
This is at 30km/hr, and everyone is braking fine, the car ahead is not even close. And proof it's not me is the 5 times it happened in 2 weeks, it was always something like this.
I was almost hit 3 times.
It literally panic brakes. Horribly designed.
I finally had it and removed the radar sensor with forscan.
With behaviour like this in something as simple as AEB, by no means would I trust anytiong else. Forums show people complaining about:
* adaptive cruise slowing down, or speeding up because it sees speed limit signs on offramps, or even adjacent roads
* the lane assist pulling strongly because the car thinks an offramp is the main road.
* reports of swerving into other lanes when passing some vehicles, the car confused
It's just junk.
This beta testing on our roads needs to stop.
What cracks me up is this.
If you asked a skilled software dev, if they'd prefer to have software designed by a team, any team, responsible for tgeir life? They'd likely say no.
Because we've all seen the crappy code that gets produced. We know of bugs. We know of failures in testing, automated or not.
These cars ae all extremely buggy, just as any software project is. But beyond that, auto manufacturers are notorious for cutting corners.
I just can't imagine why anyone, this decade, would want to trust auto drive anything.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33554679
Lidar obstacle detection algorithm from a Git repo leaked onto Tor
This is a drivable region mapping (obstacle detection) algorithm found in what appears to be a git repo leaked from an autonomous vehicle company in 2017. The repo was available through one or more Tor hidden services for several years.
The lidar code appears to be written for the Velodyne HDL-32E. It operates in a series of stages, each stage refining the output of the previous stage. This algorithm is in the second stage. It is the primary obstacle detection method, with the other methods making only small improvements.
The leaked code uses a column-major matrix of points and it explicitly handles NaNs (the no-return points). We've rewritten it to use a much more cache-efficient row-major matrix layout and a conditional that will ignore the NaN points without explicit testing.
This is an amazingly effective method of obstacle detection, considering its simplicity.
Fun fact - Cruise did actually have a source code leak a few years back, some engineer decided to embrace the 4 hour work week and outsource their role to a contractor, who uploaded their work to a public github repo (I assume this was accidental and they intended to make a private repo). But it was not core AV code.
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 timelines. In theory Tesla could say they will deploy in X city, talk with the local government to get necessary approvals, and get it going after a few test drives. Thats the tail, anyway. With that kind of go to market speed you can start acquiring customers pretty easily and start scaling up the business. Its basically the typical SaaS setup - cut some corners for market share and become the defacto player in it after some time.
I wouldn't write them out purely out of spite. Their solution is the most conducive to scaling laws, on the ML, operations, and business side.
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.
My understanding was that in many states, it's mostly just paper requirements and not any strict testing, etc.
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a) Early technology adopters are more forgiving of minor problems and are your free word-of-mouth marketers. The company benefits from lowered GTM costs.
b) Fast, reliable service depends on density; there needs to be enough cars on the road that there's always one available within a few minutes when you open the app; users will develop a habit of choosing whichever provider is reliably faster and that habit will become ingrained, making market entry for later movers more costly. First movers also have the advantage of their early adopters helping pay for their fleet as it's built up; later movers have to flood new markets with subsidized capacity to get to equivalent density. That works (Uber did it for rideshare) but it's expensive. So again: lower GTM costs.
Regarding whether this will be a viable market - Lyft/Uber have already demonstrated there's tons of demand for on-demand transportation services, and Waymo in SF is already very popular. One can back-of-the-envelope whether the economics work but generally speaking any time you replace labor with automation in a large market, it does.
In the long run though you're right that there isn't a moat that can't be solved with massive capital investment. But you could say the same about many markets; turns out one can have a successful company within a competitive market the old fashioned way.. by just being really good. It's harder, but it works.
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.
I've been very puzzled at people treating FSD as non-existent when it's very reliably good.
It's very similar to legacy space and internet, the existing players saw SpaceX coming years out, did nothing and got crushed.
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!
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.
Beyond, idk, saving my relatives the task of driving me to the airport, I don't see my family using an autonomous taxi at all. I think I'm like many Americans in that I like my personal vehicle because it's mine. I'm comfy in it, it's filled with only my stank, and I have tailored it to my liking.
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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?
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/12/10/gm-halts-funding-of-robotaxi...
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Dec 4th, 2024
GM braces for a $5 billion hit as it fights to keep up in China’s intensifying EV price war
SAIC-GM revealed in a regulatory filing on Wednesday (via The New York Times) that it expects to write down between $2.6 billion and $2.9 billion in the fourth quarter. The automaker is also expecting another $2.7 billion in restructuring expenses.
https://electrek.co/2024/12/04/gm-faces-5-billion-hit-ev-bat...
Now they've gone back to what I think GM's original plan was for acquiring Cruise — using their tech for passenger cars. Selling cars is GM's bread and butter. This wasn't going to end any other way.
Then they didn't deliver.
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?
I can't speak to their technology, but generally speaking Cruise seemed too cautious, both in the aggressiveness of the driving, and in how quickly the company capitulated. I've taken Waymo a few times and what stands out to me is how aggressive Waymo cars are. As a passenger this aggressiveness makes them feel more sophisticated, not to mention faster, but the cars also spook pedestrians to a greater extent as they nose their way into traffic or through turns. Nonetheless, Waymo has been more adept at moving past bad publicity than Cruise, including in the face of accidents.
Above and beyond whatever technological shortcomings there may have been[1], I think there was a management and business development mismatch between GM and Cruise. Cruise manifestly worked well enough. With better management--more honest, but also more aggressive--it could have been a contender; heck, it was (is?) the only proven competitor to Waymo for autonomous public taxi service, at least in the U.S.
[1] In 3 Waymo trips remote intervention was required once, which is a comparable ratio to my Cruise trips.
I’m serious about this point too. Eg. Intel pays less than half of what tsmc in Taiwan pays for similar jobs on a ppp basis after 20years of wage freezes and cuts at intel. They can’t poach any talent and investors want more layoffs and wage freezes next quarter to fix the decline they see. GM is similar. It’s not going to turn around and start competing in the high end labor market reasonably. It can’t. The big shareholders would sack the ceo in seconds. Think GM could ever compete with Google (Waymo) in a market where ai engineers can earn ) 1m/yr? Ha! The MBAs wouldn’t allow it for a second.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Levandowski
For example: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=reTensor
It was well-known and well-leaked that something was wrong with Cruise.
As soon as Cruise closed up shop, the complaints went way down.
https://sfstandard.com/2023/09/12/muni-bus-killed-san-franci...
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-02-02/safety-nu... (2018)
https://safeautonomy.blogspot.com/2023/10/a-snapshot-of-crui... (2023)
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My thoughts today are the same as they were back then. Self driving will only be solved city by city and street by street. Local governments will need to create dedicated closed-off autonomous lanes with sensors. Auto manufacturers will need to abide by a common standard to talk to local infrastructure and to each other.
Instead we chose to solve the problem in the most complex and inefficient way possible, and are now seeing the results.
The answer is that people want cars. They want to drive. They want to be taken directly from point A to point B without needing to walk to transit stops and switch buses/trains and face unpredictable schedules and delays.
Autonomous road infrastructure is a sensible, incremental improvement. And in fact city buses will tend to benefit from it the most.
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Seems pretty reasonable for difficult new tech.
https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/genie-2-a-large-scale-...
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.