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
Full Episode
In the transportation industry, there's a dream some people have. Robo-taxis. Self-driving cars that people can just call up and it'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 Otts covers the auto industry. And he says that maybe someday, if this 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 dollars. 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 robotaxi 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 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. And now they're admitting that those aspirations of this legacy car company owning a big robo-taxi business that's ferrying everyone around are not going to come true.
Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Ryan Knudson. It's Tuesday, December 17th. coming up on the show, why GM is slamming the brakes on Cruise.
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