A Cruise, a driverless robot taxi, is seen during operation in San Francisco, California, USA on July 24, 2023.
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On Tuesday, General Motors announced it might invest one other $850 million in Cruise, its troubled autonomous driving division. So far, the auto giant has already invested over $8 billion in Cruise and made losses without generating any significant revenue.
Paul Jacobson, GM Chief Financial Officer, said in the course of the Deutsche Bank Global Auto Industry Conference New York City said this extra funding would “buy us time” to conduct a “strategic review” of the department’s future.
Tiffany Testo, a spokeswoman for the corporate, wrote in an emailed statement that Cruise “appreciates GM’s continued support.”
Cruise has been in an ongoing existential crisis since an October 2023 incident in San Francisco, when certainly one of the corporate’s autonomous vehicles dragged a lady 20 feet after she had already been hit by a automobile. Since then, California regulators have revoked the corporate’s permits and the corporate has voluntarily grounded its remaining fleet. Cruise has not resumed operations in California.
In the aftermath, Mo Elshenawy, the corporate’s then-new president and chief technology officer, told employees that Cruise would take a much slower, more deliberate and cautious approach than before, in keeping with a December email obtained by Forbes.
Phil KoopmanProfessor at Carnegie Mellon University and expert on autonomous vehicles, said Forbes that GM’s decision to proceed pumping money into Cruise is puzzling, noting that the parent company could potentially be preparing to sell Cruise or that GM could simply shut Cruise down.
“I don’t see anything that’s changed technically,” Koopman said of Cruise. “It’s going to be a really tough fight.”
Last month, Cruise restarted The company calls this “supervised driving.” These rides, without passengers, have a human safety driver on the wheel and are currently being conducted in Phoenix, Arizona, and Dallas. On Tuesday, the corporate also announced that it might expand this testing phase to a 3rd city: Houston.
Since Cruise suspended all passenger services nationwide last yr, its Google competitor Waymo has remained the undisputed leader in autonomous driving. Waymo currently operates robotaxi services in Phoenix, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Austin, Texas. Still, Elshenawy stays optimistic about Cruise’s future.
“In the not too distant future, autonomous vehicles will dramatically improve the safety and efficiency of our transportation systems,” he wrote in a LinkedIn post on Tuesday. “I hope Houston is one of the places where we can demonstrate these improvements.”
In the meantime, Forbes reported last month that Cruise co-founder Kyle Vogt, who left the corporate in November 2023, had already raised $150 million for a brand new robotics startup.
Since Vogt’s departure, Cruise has not appointed a brand new CEO, but has two presidentswhich incorporates Elshenawy and Craig Glidden, a longtime GM lawyer and executive.
