Turns out it didn't work well. GM learned the hard way the founder was the best CEO of Cruise. There's a lot they do not understand about how startups and Silicon Valley work.
Dan Ammann took over and made really substantial progress. Ammann is widely considered to be the reason Cruise is where it is today. His record of success was in sharp contrast to Vogt's consistent record of failure.
Unfortunately, Ammann disagreed with GM's CEO about Cruise's future as a business. Employees at my level of seniority don't know the details, but many of us are skeptical that Kyle is the right man for the job.
And while Ammann continued to push the company to expand, there were missed targets, notably the plan to launch a commercial robotaxi business in 2019. The company has spent the past two years inching toward that commercialization goal, along with the rest of the industry, which has gone through a spate of consolidation.
Most likely that's a lot harder to get done than anyone thinks. Is Vogt really the guy to make it happen? I guess we'll find out. But GM sending an otherwise successful VP packing after more than a decade there signals they are looking to shake things up. GM is not Silicon Valley and even senior execs IMHO enjoy longer tenures that you'd find in the Valley. They also skipped over the whole reassigning him to another role / oh he's left to pursue other interests tap dancing you often see to give people some runway or cover to leave. Not sure whether to read anything into that or if that's just how Barra operates.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2021/12/16/longtime-gm-exec-dan-amman...
Ammann inherited Vogt's mess, and at that time nobody in management fully understood how bad the situation was. Ammann promptly began fixing things and we see the fruits of that today.
Ammann's departure, to the best of our knowledge, is a result of a conflict with GM's CEO regarding the future of Cruise as a business.
Hopefully Vogt can preserve, and successfully build on, what Ammann accomplished.
Is MS the bare minimum required?
Ironically I ended up canceling in large part because of the CEO spat.. it gave me some uncertainty about if they were committed to L5. Especially vs serving as GM's L3 supplier while paying L5 lip service indefinitely (and never going public)
There was also reporting that Kyle was offered this role immediately after Dan was fired but turned it down, opting to remain interim CEO while they searched for a replacement. Looks like something has changed, or they couldn't find a suitable replacement.
That sounds like a [citation needed] to me. Surely there are UI problems to be solved in a car with a human being in the driver's seat, but the sensors and automation decisionmaking is going to be identical, and that's where the hard parts are.
Or alternatively: a less charitable way of making the point work would be to say that Cruise's stack was a bunch of special-case hacks for specific regions and vehicles and wasn't scalable to arbitrary environments nor regular passenger cars.
>The sensors and automation decisionmaking is going to be identical, and that's where the hard parts are.
Sensors will be very different. LIDAR prices are coming down but we’re still a while off from incorporating it into consumer vehicles - and we’re way, way off from incorporating multiple high resolution, long range LIDAR pucks, plus short range LIDAR to cover blind spots, plus imaging radar, plus thermal cameras, etc. into commercial cars the way they’re integrated into Cruise cars right now.
Automotive decision making will also be extremely different. Modern robotaxis rely on very high detail HD maps that are continuously updated. It’s impossible to scale that nationwide in a way that would work in a consumer car. Fundamental parts of the stack assume these maps are present and accurate - remove that assumption and a ton of things have to be rethought from first principles.
Remote support is also a key part of AV stacks - that is, asking a human to clarify an ambiguous situation. There’s a video where Kyle says that Cruise cars request remote support approximately every 5 minutes. Again, fundamental parts of the stack rely on the availability of remote support and have to be rethought from first principles if it’s removed.
This isn’t even getting into the differences in compute on a Crusie car and a consumer car.
>Or alternatively: a less charitable way of making the point work would be to say that Cruise's stack was a bunch of special-case hacks for specific regions and vehicles and wasn't scalable to arbitrary environments nor regular passenger cars.
I mean you’re not wrong, but you can’t create a robotaxi without this. ML models just aren’t capable enough to handle edge cases in a safe way without tons of hacks in place.
What are the challenges here? Is it simply the different scale required on the backend to handle tens (hundreds?) of millions of privately-owned cars, vs. that required for orders of magnitude fewer robotaxis? If so, I don't think that's all that insurmountable. I guess one thing that would worry me there would be bandwidth on that scale, as well as what happens when a privately-owned car is taken into an area where it doesn't have connectivity. I assume a robotaxi would just refuse to go where it can't talk to the internet, while that would be unacceptable for a private car to do. (Then again, the private car could still have manual drive controls, and require a driver to take over when internet connectivity is lost.)
I'd be hesitant to generalize this lesson. Another case of "adult supervision", in that case against the wishes of the founders, was.... Eric Schmidt at Google. Say what you want about Google, but it's difficult to say that they weren't successful under his tenure (2001-2011)