Cruise autonomous vehicles will no longer be driving around Phoenix-area roads. General Motors, which owns Cruise, says it’s shutting down the project and will instead “realign its autonomous driving strategy and prioritize development of advanced driver assistance systems on a path to fully autonomous personal vehicles."
This comes just a few months after Cruise resumed testing its AVs in the Valley. They’d stopped after a 2023 incident in San Francisco, in which a pedestrian was dragged by a Cruise vehicle, after having been hit by a car with a driver.
Andrew Hawkins, transportation editor at The Verge, joined The Show to discuss this move from GM and Cruise and what it means.
Full conversation
MARK BRODIE: So how significant is it that Cruise is, basically, closing up shop here?
ANDREW HAWKINS: It's very significant. It, you know, Cruise was I think seen widely across the industry as having a fairly decent chance at achieving some of the same successes that Waymo has over recent years. They had a really great software team in place, the technology seemed fairly sound and they obviously had the financial backing of General Motors.
But, that really all came to a crashing halt with this incident that you mentioned in October of 2023. And then, obviously, the revelations afterwards that the company had sort of mismanaged and bungled disclosures around the, you know, the incident of the pedestrian being injured by one of their driverless vehicles. They didn't release the information to regulators and ultimately, they got fined, I think over a million dollars by the federal government for that handling of that incident.
So, it was clear that there was a lot of sort of administrative problems at the company and obviously they were also experiencing a lot of sort of technical and, and, I would say community challenges, especially in San Francisco, where their cars were criticized for, you know, blocking intersections and, you know, crashing into emergency vehicles.
So, there were a number of incidents, but that's still to be said, you know, that's sort of to be expected. A lot of these companies have similar types of incidents and, you know, there's no, there's no reason as, you know, Cruise could not have gone on to some success after sort of handling those, those problems.
BRODIE: Well, so how much of this do you think is a money issue? How much is a technology issue? How much might be something else?
HAWKINS: I think it's almost 100% a financial issue. I mean, that was something that GM CEO Mary Barra talked about extensively in a call with investors last week, where she repeatedly described Cruise as “not being part of GM's core business.” That is a marked difference from what, you know, statements that she made in the public. Only just two years ago, where she talked about how, you know, GM was going to become this futuristic company involved in all of these sort of different mobility projects, mobility sort of being a buzzword that they used to describe lots of different things including autonomous vehicles.
And so, it was clear that at that time, you know, sort of the company was riding really high on sort of optimism around, not only autonomy, but also electric vehicles and sort of what the future was going to hold. And now, I think that they're sort of confronting a much more uncertain regulatory environment, there's a, a retrenchment and a focus more sort of on the core business of just making cars and selling cars.
And obviously, you know, the GM is not totally abandoning the project. They say that they're going to fold the Cruise team into their larger Super Cruise project, which is about hands-free autonomy in personally owned vehicles. And Barra still says that the company intends to sell fully autonomous vehicles for personal use, at some point in the future.
BRODIE: Yeah, I want to ask you about that because it seems as though the conventional wisdom is sort of that, that's not the direction that autonomous vehicles are going, that it will sort of be these robotaxis, as opposed to you own an autonomous vehicle and park it in your garage or your driveway. Is GM, like trying to buck the trend here?
HAWKINS: Yeah, I, there's certainly, it seems like that, that's the case. It's a very risky proposition. You know, the, the idea behind autonomous vehicles is that, you know, the technology is going to take a really long time to mature, to really get to the point where it can be safely deployed in cities, you know, sort of without any sort of restrictions and that, you know, it can be, you know, sort of expected to perform as safe, if not safer, than human drivers.
We're still a long ways off from that. Waymo made a lot of strides, obviously, but they are still sort of progressing very slowly and sort of cautiously, I would say. And so, the idea of just sort of putting this technology in the hands of normal people, not having it overseen by technical experts or specialists of any kind, is definitely a very risky proposition for, for GM. But, you know, there are a lot of experts that say that eventually at some point in the distant future, we may eventually get to that point, and I think GM wants to sort of stake out a position as to capitalize on that when it, when and if it comes.
BRODIE: So we've seen, for example, Uber try autonomous vehicles in the Valley, they're not doing this anymore. Cruise is not doing this anymore. Are these companies basically ceding this space to Waymo? Like, has Waymo basically won at this point?
HAWKINS: Well, I think that what we're seeing is a shift here. Waymo is most certainly far ahead of, of a lot of the other companies and we still have, there are still a few players left. There's Zoox, which is owned by Amazon. There's a company called Motional, which is being run by Hyundai. And then there's another company called Nuro, which is more focused on delivery and there's a lot of sort of trucking start-ups, Aurora and a few others, that are focused on making self-driving trucks.
But in terms of the robotaxi space, I think it's really, you know, Waymo is sort of stands alone at the moment as being sort of, you know, the one that not only has driverless vehicles right now on the streets in Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles, but they've also announced plans to expand into places like Austin, Miami and Atlanta. And just today, they said that they're going to start testing their vehicles in Japan, their first international test.
So clearly, the company is feeling very bullish about its technology and, and wanting to make sure that, that it expands as, as sort of progresses as well as it can. But I think it just shows that, you know, a company like GM and a company like Alphabet, which, you know, is obviously the parent company of Google, are, are just in much different positions at the moment. The auto industry is sort of going through a, you know, a lot of problems around, you know, sales and there's obviously questions around EV policy, whereas the tech companies, the big tech companies like Amazon and Google are still, you know, making huge profits, huge revenues. And I think that they're, you know, sort of the sky’s the limit when it comes to those companies backing this technology.
