On July 23, General Motors said that its self-driving subsidiary Cruise will focus its development on the next-generation Chevrolet Bolt, while the original planned launch of the steering-wheel-less Origin self-driving car will be postponed indefinitely. In 2022, General Motors submitted a petition to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) requesting permission to deploy up to 2,500 driverless Origin vehicles per year without human controls such as brake pedals or rearview mirrors.
NHTSA has yet to take any action on the request, while GM has blamed regulatory risks for its decision to delay steering-wheel-less self-driving cars.
As a result, GM will use a traditional next-generation Bolt electric vehicle as the platform for its Cruise self-driving taxis, as the move does not require U.S. regulatory approval. "I do think there's still opportunity for Origin in the future, so when the time is right, we'll still be able to move forward with that project," GM CEO Mary Barra said.
Analysts and industry experts say the race to develop self-driving systems and self-driving taxis will be difficult, expensive and take years as the technology faces engineering and regulatory hurdles.
However, on July 23, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said that Tesla has made great progress in fully autonomous driving (FSD) and self-driving taxis.
"While my past expectations have been overly optimistic, I would be shocked if we don't achieve full self-driving without supervision next year," Musk said on the company's conference call. He added that Tesla has delayed the release of its self-driving taxi product from August to October 10 to allow improvements to the vehicle.
In another conference call on July 23, Alphabet Chief Financial Officer Ruth Porat said the company would invest an additional $5 billion in its self-driving subsidiary Waymo over the next few years. Waymo also said it has begun testing new self-driving taxis in San Francisco based on models from Chinese electric car manufacturer Jikrypton Motors (a brand owned by Geely).
In November, General Motors said it had temporarily halted production of its fully autonomous Cruise Origin, revealing that the decision to suspend Cruise production at its Detroit plant had resulted in $583 million in expenses.
Mary Barra said: "The main reason for moving from Origin to Bolt is that we eliminated regulatory risk." However, Musk pointed out that the reason why Cruise abandoned Origin was more because the company could not make the technology work. "Cruise's blaming of regulators is misleading when in fact the company's technology is not up to par," Musk said.
GM spokesman Jim Cain called Musk's comments about Cruise "completely wrong." He said: "The problem is Origin's unique layout and design. The technology being developed by Cruise is improving every day, and Cruise has completed more than 5 million miles of self-driving testing, while Tesla has zero self-driving test miles."
Cruise faced multiple investigations after a crash last October, including from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. In the incident, one of Cruise's self-driving taxis struck a pedestrian and dragged him 20 feet (about 6 meters). Both Cruise and General Motors came under fire after the accident, with the state of California revoking Cruise's license to operate self-driving cars.
Then in November last year, Cruise co-founder Kyle Vogt resigned as CEO after the accident. On July 23, he said on X that GM killed the Origin project. Kyle Vogt compared GM's early leadership in electric vehicles in the 1990s to its current situation, writing: "General Motors had a 5 to 10-year lead in autonomous driving, but then lost it because of mistakes and suspended programs."
On July 23, Barra noted that Cruise had resumed testing of self-driving taxis with human safety drivers in three cities in recent months and hired a new CEO. Barra previously said that the autonomous driving business could generate $50 billion in annual revenue by 2030. But the fact is that Cruise has lost more than $8 billion since 2017, and in January this year, General Motors said it would cut Cruise's expenses by about $1 billion.