Why GM Is Giving Up on Cruise Robotaxis

为什么通用汽车放弃 Cruise Robotaxis

The Journal.

新闻

2024-12-18

19 分钟
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After nearly a decade and $10 billion in development, General Motors is ending its robotaxi program. WSJ’s Christopher Otts explains why Cruise wasn’t working for the legacy car company. Further Reading: -General Motors Scraps Cruise Robotaxi Program  -GM’s Self-Driving Car Unit Skids Off Course  Further Listening: -How Waymo Won Over San Francisco  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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  • In the transportation industry, there's a dream some people have.

  • Robo taxis, self driving cars that people can just call up and that'll take them wherever they need to go.

  • Yeah, it's been a big aspiration and it has huge implications for the traditional auto industry.

  • Our colleague Chris Otz covers the auto industry and he says that maybe someday, if this technology, technology gets good enough, people won't even need to own cars anymore.

  • If you think about it, your personal vehicle is idle the vast, vast majority of the time.

  • If you have reliable self driving cars, that changes the entire paradigm in terms of what the auto industry is.

  • You could have cars that are owned centrally by a fleet instead of people owning personal vehicles.

  • So to move into a world where you have on demand transportation, that could totally upend transportation as we know it.

  • One of the companies that's been trying to do that is called Cruise.

  • It's owned by General Motors.

  • Cruise is an autonomous vehicle startup that General Motors bought and has invested heavily in over the last decade.

  • Billions of doll General Motors, you know, only a few years ago predicted that Cruise would generate $50 billion a year in revenue by the end of the decade.

  • And GM had hoped that Cruise was a big part of its future.

  • But last week GM said that after investing $10 billion over the last decade, it's killing its robo taxi program.

  • Cruise, the autonomous vehicle company, they're pulling their cars from the streets.

  • General Motors, which owns Cruise, says it's moving away from the robo taxi business.

  • The company says it'll.

  • The whole question for GM is what is the future?

  • Where is the growth?

  • Cruise was a big part of the moonshot future growth story for General Motors.