The unmanned Cruise division of General Motors Corporation is going through difficult times amid huge losses, investigations into accidents involving unmanned electric vehicles Cruise AV, and their shutdown commercial operation and vague prospects for the entire project.
Initially, Cruise was an unmanned startup from San Francisco, founded in 2013 by young enthusiastic entrepreneurs — the unmanned idea was then at the peak of its popularity in the auto industry, and it seemed to everyone that by the end of the decade, cars without steering wheels and pedals would fill the roads of civilized countries. In 2016, this startup was bought by General Motors Corporation, and since then Cruise has been its unmanned division.
GM expected to launch the ethereal taxi into commercial operation at the end of 2019, but this did not happen due to the unpreparedness of the regulatory framework. There is still no universal legislative mechanism that allows you to transfer responsibility for safety while driving from a person to a machine (artificial intelligence) and/or manufacturing company in any country in the world, but there are “crutches”, that is, introduced in certain territories by local authorities have rules allowing drones, subject to a large number of restrictions, to travel on public roads.
Cruise AV
In 2020, GM received permission from the city of San Francisco to test operate unmanned electric Cruise AV electric vehicles without test drivers in the cabin, and last year they began commercial operation in taxi mode, but due to a lot of restrictions, low speed and high costs This business cannot be called successful — we talked about this in more detail in a separate note.
Cruise AV < p>Cruise AV is nothing more than an unmanned version of the Chevrolet Bolt EV electric hatchback; these are the cars that until recently plied the streets of American cities. At the end of October, California authorities revoked the operating permit for Cruise AV taxis after a string of accidents involving them. The most resonant was a combined accident that occurred late in the evening of October 2 in San Francisco: a Cruise AV then hit a pedestrian who was hit by an inattentive driver of a Nissan Sentra sedan. It turned out that the Nissan Sentra pushed the pedestrian into the lane along which the Cruise AV was driving; the drone recognized the obstacle, but did not have time to brake — there was too little time. And the main problem is that the drone dragged the downed pedestrian about six meters, as it tried to pull over to the side of the road so as not to be an obstacle. The pedestrian survived; he is now in hospital in serious condition.
Cruise AV
Following the California ban, GM executives stopped Cruise AV operations in other states as well, and the 950-vehicle fleet will be recalled to fix software bugs. When and under what conditions the work of an unmanned taxi will resume is still unknown.
Cruise Origin
GM also announced that it would stop production of the unmanned Cruise Origin shuttle until better times. Let us recall that Cruise Origin was presented in 2020 as a new generation unmanned taxi; it has no steering wheel or pedals in the cabin at all, and all seats are passenger seats. Cruise Origin did not work as a taxi, but, as it turned out, GM produced several hundred of these shuttles at the Factory Zero electric vehicle plant in Detroit, which, in fact, stand idle, there is no point in “stamping” new ones.
Cruise Origin
Cruise's loss in the first three quarters of this year amounted to $1.9 billion — we, to be honest, We don’t really understand why GM is holding on to it so stubbornly; there is no talk of eliminating it yet. General Motors CEO Mary Barra continues to believe that by 2030 Cruise could begin to bring the corporation $50 billion a year in sales of services and technologies, but there are no objective prerequisites for this yet. The imperfection of self-driving cars is increasingly worrying the public, and the main concern is not GM’s work in this direction, but the rapid activity of Tesla, which included hundreds of thousands of people in the risky beta testing program for its FSD autoploy.
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