Summarizer

Plenty of people have voiced much larger visions, for decades. There was a spate of futurists in the 80s, Waymo itself, and others like Dave Ferguson of Nuro. But autonomous vehicles have been an incredibly volatile industry. Anyone shooting for the moon (that's not seemingly immune to market pressures) has had those grand visions beaten down by the whiplash of funding. Companies have responded by focusing on those those first, real steps to demonstrate the "easy" stuff. The experimental stuff will come later when they're looking for ways to expand and investor money is more confident in the technology's future.

It seems tough culturally. If you look at it from an outside point of view, right now Tesla is worth $1.6T, Waymo is worth $130B, and GM is worth $72B. If Cruise were actually a third viable competitor in this race, it would probably be worth more than the rest of GM. Self-driving is just a far more valuable business than car-making. So from that point of view it would make sense to say, don't worry about the rest of GM too much, you should be willing to sacrifice all of that to increase the changes of making Cruise work. It's hard to change the culture at a place like GM though. Does the GM CEO really want to take a huge amount of risk? Would they be willing to take a 50-50 shot where they either 10x the company's value or lose it all? Or would they prefer to pay a few billion dollars to avoid that risk.

Pushing Dan Ammann out was a bad idea. I personally like the original set up at the time. Kyle as the CTO and Dan as the CEO. Kyle was great as an internal CEO, he was calling most of the internal shots anyway. The accident would have played out very differently if Dan Ammann was the CEO IMO. (Also former Cruise employee)

Was always unclear to me whether DanA was truly pushed out, or if the board (largely comprised of GM execs) wanted to take the company in a different direction than Dan wanted to go, and Dan decided to leave rather than stick around. Ie. IPO vs keep it a majority owned subsidiary. (Another former employee)

I got the impression that it was a conflict with Mary Barra specifically, not so much the board as a whole. They simply went along with her. The tone of the notice was indicative of being pushed out, not a mutual parting of ways. (Another former).

As an outsider I assumed it took GM a substantial investment just to realize how far out of their depth they were. It made sense to cut their losses once they figured this out. Having experience and capability to manufacturer cars has approximately zero benefit to create a self-driving software/sensor stack. It would make more sense for Adobe to create a self-driving car than GM.

Cruise was being operated as a separate company though. As a default, GM could have just not done anything and let Cruise operate as if it were independent. Any synergies (personnel, manufacturing expertise, etc) would have just been a bonus. And if they didn't want the financial exposure, they could have spun it out again. Instead they chopped it up for spare parts, specifically, sending some Cruise personnel to work on deadend GM driver assistance tech and firing the rest. Baffling.

Maybe I'm giving GM too much credit, but it seems to me that GM acquired the technology with the intention to bring it into their vehicles as driver assistance, not autonomous driving. They were pretty candid about not wanting to operate taxis. Cruise itself was embroiled in investigations and was prohibited from operating in SF and voluntarily ceased operations in other markets, which basically made it a target, and since GM had already dumped a few billion into it, it probably made sense to at least get unencumbered rights to the tech.

We should not forget this is the same company that had an amazing lead on everyone in the electric car market 3 decades ago with the EV1. See "Who Killed the Electric Car [0] [0] https://www.whokilledtheelectriccar.com/

Cruise was actually just about to return to market after the October incident [1]. We had reached efficacy on all (much harder) internal safety benchmarks showing the car had significantly improved. GM pulled the rug on us a day or two before announcing. The current Cruise CEO wasn't aware at all either. I have my own conspiracies of why GM did this, but GM also has a long history of fumbling the ball. [1] https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/nhtsa-robotaxi-cru... [2] https://www.theautopian.com/here-are-five-times-gm-developed... !

It seems the time car companies thought more than 4 years ahead was in 2007 and that culture was swiftly removed from the industry out of the economic shock that occurred shortly after.

Personally as much as people like to dunk on Musk, he did build several successful companies in extremely challenging domains, and he probably listens to the world-leading domain experts in his employ. So while he might turn out to be wrong, I don't think his opininon is uninformed.

> I fully agree with your first point: Musk has shown tremendous ability to manage companies to become unicorns. He's clearly skilled in this domain. I would firmly disagree with that. What Musk has done is bring money to develop technologies that were generally considered possible, but were being ignored by industry incumbents because they were long-term development projects that would not be profitable for years. When he brings money to good engineers and lets them do their thing, pretty good things happen. The Tesla Roadster, Model S, Falcon 9, Starlink, etc. The problem with him is he's convinced that he is also a good engineer, and not only that but he's better than anyone that works for him, and that has definitively been proven wrong. The more he takes charge, the worse it gets. The Model X's stupid doors, all the factory insanity, the outdoor paint tent, etc. Model 3 and Model Y arguably succeeded in spite of his interference, but the Dumpstertruck was his baby and we can all see how that has basically only sold to people who want to associate themselves closely with his politics because it's objectively bad at everything else. The constant claims that Tesla cars will drive themselves, the absolute bullshit that is calling it "Full Self Driving", the hilarious claims of humanoid robots being useful, etc. How are those solar roofs coming? Have you heard of anyone installing a Powerwall recently? Heard anything about Roadster 2.0 since he went off claiming it would be able to fly? A bunch of Canadian truckers have built their own hybrid logging trucks from scratch in the time since Tesla started taking money for their semis and we still haven't seen the Tesla trucks haul more than a bunch of bags of chips. The more Musk is personally involved with a project the worse it is. The man is useful for two things: Providing capital and blatantly lying to hype investors. If he had stuck to the first one the world as a whole would be a better place, Tesla would probably be in a much better position right now. SpaceX was for a long time considered to be further from his influence with Shotwell running the company well and Musk acting more as a spokesperson. Starship is sort of his Model X moment and the plans to merge in the AI business will IMO be the Cybertruck.

I don't thing it's purely stubbornness. Tesla sold the promise of software only updates resulting in FSD to hundreds of thousands of people. Not all of those people are in the cult of Tesla. I would expect admitting defeat at this point would result in a large class action lawsuit at the very least.

It wouldn't keep them from equipping _new_ models with additional sensors, spinning a story around how this helps them train the camera-only AI, or whatever.