Having worked for GM I can say, one of the best things GM did was after they bought Cruise they kept it as a separate company and away from GM bureaucratic style of management where everything comes to die.
I wonder if they're underestimating its importance or if there might be internal fighting within GM.
This is another advantage Tesla has being all in towards the goal.
While owned by General Motors, no. But with Softbank buying in, maybe GM is backing away from Cruise.
Is this another the Saudi Arabia sovereign wealth fund investment via Softbank? They seem to have become the world's largest source of dumb money.
Is there anybody, anywhere, yet who is deploying self-driving cars without "safety drivers" or insisting the driver remain active at the wheel? Cruise, no. Waymo, did for a while, then backed off. Volvo was supposed to be deploying by now but backed off. There are a few self-driving shuttle buses, but they're really slow, like 10mph, except when on dedicated pathways.
Companies that are claiming they will deploy in volume in the next two years are bullshitting. Nobody has Level 3 self driving working reliably in test yet. Let alone Level 4 or 5.
SoftBank was already a big investor in Cruise.
They could have it as a standard feature on their cars rather than a high trim level on one.
GM seems to think it's important since they bought Cruise in the first place, but instead of seeing failure on this as an existential threat it seems more like a side project for them.
From the outside this seems like a bad strategy and will only succeed if it turns out self-driving is impossible (which seems unlikely).
Digital cameras were toys until suddenly they weren't and then Kodak died - even though they had invented the digital camera in the first place.
It's not enough to have the tech, you have to prioritize it in the business. Xerox PARC is another example of this type of failure.
[1] https://mashable.com/article/super-cruise-cadillac-ct5-sedan...
It still seems like they’re being pretty slow about it.
I remember the QuickTake and all that. Yes, those small pixelated images weren’t the same quality as film but they had other benefits instead.
Self driving cars currently aren’t in a state where they can do anything, even waymo still has safety drivers.
Because dumb cars with dumb humans in them kill far more than self driving cars do.
which is exactly why removing people out of the equation is the best way to solve the problem. even fully educated and hyper responsible person is not immune to judgement lapses, hallucinations, heart attacks, strokes, losses of consciousness and many more modes of failure.
what's worst - even if i'm 100% sure about myself, even if i take myself out of the equation - there are still thousands murderous humans driving around me.
humans should not be driving cars.
Wait a min, when did this happen ? and who is Dan Ammann. Why would you move Kyle Vogt into a CTO position. This is bizzare.