GM is increasing its stake in Cruise, but won’t dedicate the subsidiary toward a new robotaxi.
On Tuesday, General Motors made the announcement that it plans to “realign its autonomous driving strategy” — and that will include pulling away from funding robotaxi development. Instead, the automaker says it will focus on refining its Super Cruise suite of semi-autonomous driving technology for personal vehicles.
“As the largest U.S. automotive manufacturer, we’re fully committed to autonomous driving and excited to bring GM customers its benefits,” said senior vice president of software and services engineering Dave Richardson in the company’s statement. Moving forward, the company will combine its majority-owned subsidiary Cruise LLC with other technical teams in pursuit of advancing its driver assistance systems and, eventually, enabling a fully autonomous driving suite for retail customers.
“GM will no longer fund Cruise’s robotaxi development work given the considerable time and resources that would be needed to scale the business, along with an increasingly competitive robotaxi market,” the automaker stated.
Apart from money its already poured into Cruise, including GM’s own acquisition of the company in 2016 and billions of dollars of further investment over the past several years, this is the latest chapter in the company’s robotaxi saga since Cruise paused operations following a crash involving a pedestrian in October 2023. Following that incident and suspension of its services, Cruise LLC founder and CEO Kyle Vogt resigned from his post in November 2023. GM named Marc Whitten, a former Amazon executive and founding engineer under Microsoft’s Xbox division, this past June.
Cruise restarted its operations in some major cities, while it also inked a deal with Uber Technologies (which had its own woes developing a robotaxi service) for customers to book Cruise robotaxis through its platform starting next year. For the moment, it’s unclear what GM’s plan to restructure its subsidiary will do for that deal, especially as it pulls funding to develop such vehicles in the first place.
As part of its statement, GM said it would raise its ownership in Cruise from 90% today to 97%, and ultimately pursue acquisition of the remaining shares to make it a wholly-owned subsidiary. Also from GM’s statement: “Contingent upon the repurchase of these shares and Cruise board approval, GM will work with the Cruise leadership team to restructure and refocus Cruise’s operations. GM expects the restructuring to lower spending by more than $1 billion annually after the proposed plan is completed, expected in the first half of 2025.”
With GM out of the picture, the main competition in the robotaxi market exists between Alphabet, Inc. (Google)’s Waymo unit and Tesla, which itself plans to introduce a “Cybercab” to the masses in 2026.
