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San Francisco based Cruise, once regarded a leading contender in the robotaxi races, announced it will shut shop due to mounting losses.
Context: Cruise was acquired by General Motors, the major Detroit-automaker, for roughly $1 billion back in 2016. For nearly a decade, GM continued to fund the company’s experiments, against every single instinct it had as an automaker to remain cost disciplined.
GM had even brought in external backers like Microsoft, Walmart, Softbank, the best of the best to provide outside capital.
But the company struggled to give Cruise a free hand, and far underestimated how much money it would actually take until autonomy could be perfected.
An accident and a decade later, GM finally bucked under the pressure. GM will instead fold Cruise into its in-house autonomy unit which makes ADAS systems.
Why care: what started as a competitive arena for self-driving is now left with only 2 credible players, Google’s Waymo and Elon’s Tesla.
Macro theme: but autonomy is just around the corner. Just last week, Sundar Pichai disclosed Waymo now does 175,000 rides, every single week, across 5-6 major US cities. It’s all about how quickly regulations clear up for mass deployment.
