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Transportation

GM Exits Robotaxi Market (cnbc.com) 47

Posted by msmash from the end-of-road dept.
After spending more than $10 billion on its robotaxi unit, General Motors is abandoning its Cruise driverless ride-hailing service. From a report: The Detroit automaker on Tuesday said it will no longer fund its Cruise division's robotaxi development and will instead fold the unit into its broader tech team. "Cruise was well on its way to a robotaxi business -- but when you look at the fact you're deploying a fleet, there's a whole operations piece of doing that," GM CEO Mary Barra said on a call Tuesday.

Barra said GM would instead focus on the development of autonomous systems for use in personal vehicles. GM cited the increasingly competitive robotaxi market, capital allocation priorities and the considerable time and resources necessary to grow the business as reasons for its decision.

GM Exits Robotaxi Market More | Reply

GM Exits Robotaxi Market

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  • If you deploy a Robotaxi before it's cost competitive, then it's just a PR move. There are better ways to get driving data.

    • If you deploy a Robotaxi before it's cost competitive, then it's just a PR move.

      Huh? Lots of businesses lose money at first for years. Waymo must have lost a ton of money for years. (Probably still is overall, though they say individual rides are now profitable.) But now they are reaching the cusp of profiting to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars from selling rides and licencensing their tech. Especially with so many would-be competitors (Uber, Cruise) waving the white flag.

      There are Chi

      • Huh? Lots of businesses lose money at first for years. Waymo must have lost a ton of money for years.

        Yes. Waymo's Robotaxi is a PR move.

        But now they are reaching the cusp of profiting to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars from selling rides and licencensing their tech.

        If that's true, then it sounds like their PR move worked. I don't know why you think they are about to license their tech, though. I searched but didn't find a reference.

        • "Yes Waymo's Robotaxi is a PR move..."

          I don't understand how their core business can be considered a PR move. That's how they grew the tech from small-scale testing with a safety driver, to paid driverless rides by the millions. It's not the kind of thing you can just develop in a lab and then spring on the world fully-formed one day.

          Here's an article that talks about partnering with Moove and Uber.

          https://www.forbes.com/sites/b... [forbes.com]

          But it does sound like the whole picture of direct sales vs partner

          • I don't understand how their core business can be considered a PR move.

            Waymo's core business is self-driving car technology. It's not Robotaxis.

            But it does sound like the whole picture of direct sales vs partnering vs licensing is still in flux.

            Yeah, Robotaxis are one option. They also might make a trillion dollars licensing the tech to GM. But right now their cars are too expensive to replace humans in a cost effective way.

    • Actually a taxi business is a very good way to get data as they drive through the streets 24/7. It is the most stupid idea to cancel that if you want better personal cars with selfdriving capabilities.
      • You can drive through the streets 24/7 without passengers. Having a person inside the car doesn't make any difference.
        • That's not exactly true, a person in the car changes some dynamic aspects of the car. But using the car as a taxiservice makes it better for situations like pickup and parking etc. also if the car is driving anyway, a taxiservice might actually offset the cost of the testing of the car on the road.

          • That's not exactly true, a person in the car changes some dynamic aspects of the car.

            You mean the car is heavier or something?

            But using the car as a taxiservice makes it better for situations like pickup and parking etc.

            Well that part is true, Waymo absolutely sucks at pickup, blocking roads etc. I have no idea why considering the detailed maps they have.

  • Isn't the point of a robotaxi that we can give up our cars, or at least get down to one per household.
    • There's a huge space that needs more work in the "just handle the highway for me" part of the problem.

    • Re:GM will now work against them (Score:4, Insightful)

      by timeOday ( 582209 ) on Tuesday December 10, 2024 @07:17PM (#65004481)
      Not for me. Our SUV is like our home away from home on trips. People with long commutes feel that way about their car. I'm going to own it until it wears out anyways so there is really no waste to not having it in operation 24x7, just garage space which is worth it to me.

      Besides while there are efficiencies to sharing, there are also inefficiencies. People don't take care of other peoples' stuff, you have to pay big bucks for professional maintenance, etc.

      Bottom line, sorry to be gross, but sitting in other peoples' seat stains is not like sitting in your own seat stains.

      • Not for me. Our SUV is like our home away from home on trips. People with long commutes feel that way about their car. I'm going to own it until it wears out anyways so there is really no waste to not having it in operation 24x7, just garage space which is worth it to me.

        Besides while there are efficiencies to sharing, there are also inefficiencies. People don't take care of other peoples' stuff, you have to pay big bucks for professional maintenance, etc.

        Bottom line, sorry to be gross, but sitting in other peoples' seat stains is not like sitting in your own seat stains.

        I'm shocked by the number of people that don't get this aspect of owning a vehicle. I'm not an SUV guy, but my small pickup is not just useful for hauling leaves and equipment, but also has a cab that feels like home to me. It almost makes me wonder if the "you will own nothing and love it" mantra has some drum beaters working on the narrative. It's hard for me to imagine not having that connection with a vehicle. Then again, I know a lot of teens that have zero interest in even driving a vehicle, let alone

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AuMatar ( 183847 )

          Hell, I just want to be able to keep things in the trunk and have the car there and available when I'm ready to go, and not 10 minutes later when one is free. Those reasons alone are why I'd never swap to robo-taxis for general use.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by CapS ( 83352 )

        Are you talking about loaning out your car to other people, or using a robotaxi yourself?

        - If you're talking about loaning your car out to other people, you could have a second car. Make money off of your robotaxi car. It's like having an Airbnb. Then have your main car as your "home" vehicle that you don't rent out.

        - If you're referring to borrowing a car/using a robotaxi, there are situations where that may come up (flying to a different city for example).

  • sub contract the fleet part out so when something bad happens the sub contractor will be only one on the hook.

  • No value proposition (Score:5, Interesting)

    by BishopBerkeley ( 734647 ) on Tuesday December 10, 2024 @07:24PM (#65004495) Journal
    GM's statement is still not getting to the heart of the matter: it's hard to replace a cab driver with a very expensive car, profitably. The Google Jaguar robotaxis are behemoths when you see them. All the sensors and lidars hanging off the various parts of the car are quite impressive. Each car costs easily 100s of thousands of dollars, if not over a million, and this doesn't even include the cost of connectivity and the massive datacenters that have to be monitoring and guiding each vehicle. All of this expense to replace a cab driver making, at best, $80K a year while driving a $30,000 car. The ROI is decades down the line, unless the cost per car drops dramatically, possibly as much as 90%. (And, let's not forget, part of fleet management is taking cars out of service when someone hurls in them or loses control of their bowels in them, etc.) It's hard to imagine Tesla pulling it off, too. The tiny, featureless, spartan Tesla cabs are a realistic attempt at a cheap vehicle that could turn a profit within ten years instead of in thirty years, but that also depends on whether Tesla can manufacture, deploy and maintain a fleet of a million of them within a decade. Simply achieving the necessary scale to make it profitable is nearly impossible, and this is assuming that the computational cost of maintaining a million automatic cars scales linearly with the number of cars deployed. It probably scales exponentially. GM's stock is doing very well because its management is making business decisions instead of pursuing pipe dreams.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Google is concentrating on getting it to work reliably, not cost reduction.

      The real reason is most likely because the Chinese have the tech working and GM know they won't be able to get there in a timeframe that matters, or at a price point that is competitive.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AvitarX ( 172628 )

      I think you're correct in spirit, but are over exaggerating the need for reduction.

      Likely you can replace 1.5 cab drivers per car, not one (drivers can't work 24/7).

      $120k/year savings on a car that costs $500k extra doesn't seem so terrible. Even $80k savings on $500k is approaching break even.

      Life expectancy and maintenance costs of the add ons are far more likely to be a bigger deal than the raw cost.

      The cares per a medallion (monthly) in NYC are $15k/month, so eliminating that $6k/month is big savings (p

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by mjwx ( 966435 )
      Forget expense, this is more GM admitting the tech doesn't work. Ultimately someone has to be first.

      Tesla will keep going for ages (well as long as it can) without delivering a working product with Musk promising it'll all work next year. Google will be in Forever Beta. Right now, robotaxis can't even make a decision about which way to turn at an intersection, causing massive traffic jams... Forget being better than your average driver, they aren't even capable of passing a standard UK driving test.

    • If they can just keep increasing the cost of a baseline vehicle to the point no one can afford to own one, they'll get their scale ramped up via "have to" passengers in order to get to the jobs we're all not going to have in ten years or so, when the AI takes over everything for us. See? It's all working out perfectly!

    • It isn't about making money, it's about bragging rights.

  • The various incidents and accidents that Cruze has had (and the costs resulting from them) probably don't help...

    • I've done a lot of robotaxi rides in San Francisco, but mostly in Waymos. I took a few in Cruise vehicles before they were pulled from the road but stopped because they felt unpolished, and in some cases unsafe. They would randomly stop at intersections for minutes, and would sort of drift from side to side in lanes on straight roads. The Waymo cars are _so_ far out ahead of everyone else in this space it's not even a competition. I am looking forward to trying the Zoox cars soon, tho.
  • What problem were they trying to solve, exactly?
  • Going by the reports after the previous execs were forced out, they never really had anything good in terms of self driving AI built and were just wasting money for years. Scrubbing the whole thing as a loss at least avoids sunk cost fallacy.

  • Orange cones FTW (Score:3, Funny)

    by raminf ( 255396 ) on Tuesday December 10, 2024 @11:13PM (#65004767)

    You run over ONE PERSON and now you're known as the run-over robotaxi.

    The Orange Cone people, btw, deserve a prize for Most Inspired, Non-Violent Insurgent Resistance Action.

  • Good! (Score:3)

    by dskoll ( 99328 ) on Wednesday December 11, 2024 @09:53AM (#65005371) Homepage

    Good. Self-driving cars need to die [youtube.com] because they are not a good solution to anything, and in fact are a terrible solution for our cities.

    • I would love a self-driving car, if it really worked. I don't see the likelihood of a reliable all-purpose self-driving car that I could trust for at least 20-30 years.

      But, consider how much more achievable it would be if instead of highways it was all rail for private vehicles. Reducing the degrees of freedom is like magic for any problem.

      It also makes it sort of funny that there is no progress on self-driving freight trains.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dskoll ( 99328 )

        I would not want a self-driving car. Rather, I'd want my politicians (federal, provincial and municipal) to get their heads out of their asses and start designing and building walkable, bikable and transit-friendly cities that are designed for people first rather than card.

        Unfortunately, I live in Canada, where our politicians are at best useless and at worst actively malicious when it comes to improving our lives. In other words, they are marginally better than politicians in the USA.

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