Ask HN: What really happened to Cruise self-driving cars?
Rough summary of the available public information:
- They had an accident in 2023 injuring, by not stopping instantly, a passerby who was hit by another car.
- They were investigated and then California temporarily suspended their license to drive around.
- By the end of 2023 there was a massive layoff, including top executives leaving. There were claims that the operation was too human-dependent / required too much human interventions.
- In 2024 there were some news that they were starting up again (outside CA maybe).
- In Dec 2024, GM dropped their funding altogether and gave up on self-driving / robotaxi, refocusing on driver assistance instead. Some analysts claimed that was in part (in addition to finances) due to politics and them not wanting to face off with Tesla under the new administration.
It always seemed to me that something was missing from the overall picture:
- While second to Waymo, they still seemed already far ahead from others; maybe they were, say, 90% there.
- Others, like Tesla, had many accidents, including fatal ones. But for those the gauntlet was not thrown that quickly. It is expected that self-driving cars will have accidents as they continue to improve; why would one such incident, that wasn't even fatal, have such a dramatic response?
- Sure it's possible that Cruise was just a row in a spreadsheet to some finance higher-ups at GM, and it was dropped like that because it wasn't making them money yet. But to drop such a multi-year investment has to have been something else, a deeper problem:
- E.g. Did they realize/decide that the technical architecture was somehow flawed and there was an unbreakable barrier that prevents them from achieving that remaining 10%?