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GM and Cruise Failure

Former employees expressing confusion over GM abandoning Cruise, discussion of corporate culture issues, speculation about why GM pulled funding just as technology was improving

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Former Cruise employees and industry observers express deep bafflement at GM’s decision to pull funding just as autonomous technology reached critical safety benchmarks, viewing the move as a repeat of the automaker's historical tendency to sabotage its own innovations. Many attribute the failure to a profound cultural mismatch between a risk-averse legacy corporation and a high-stakes tech startup, further exacerbated by internal power struggles and leadership's mishandling of high-profile safety incidents. While some argue that GM fumbled a trillion-dollar opportunity by retreating into safer driver-assistance software, skeptics suggest Cruise was simply outmatched by Waymo's technical superiority and destined to be "chopped for spare parts."

17 comments tagged with this topic

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I'm forever baffled that GM gave up on Cruise just as soon as Waymo was proving that autonomous driving is feasible. (Disclaimer: former Cruise employee)
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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.
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It's funny to use "the market value of all taxi companies combined" as a proxy for how valuable the self-driving market will be, because that's exactly the reasoning that led people to underestimate Uber. The market value of all taxi companies combined was pretty small when Uber started. That said, you could be right! Maybe self-driving will never be worth more than that. It's really hard to tell what business models will be like in the future. But this is the cultural mismatch, it seemed like GM leadership did not want to be in a risky business where they were betting billions of dollars on the success of self-driving. Clearly, to some people, that seemed like a really good bet to make. Time will tell.
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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)
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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)
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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).
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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.
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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.
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Reputational risk to GM from the cavalier/shameful way Cruise/Kyle Vogt operated. Tried to hide the fact they dragged a person.
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I remember GM cars in Herzliya, Israel with cables and cameras held by duct tape circa 2019 after Andrej Karpathy already presented end to end neural network training for Autopilot in Tesla. Looked like very late to the party.
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One of my good friends was a driver for Cruise (he sit in the cars while they drove and made tons of notes about the behavior) He said they were pretty awful and would constantly mess up.
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I liked my one and ride in Cruise however the problem I had was it took 10 minutes or so for my car to depart. Car arrives. I get in. The car is sitting there getting ready to depart but not moving. After a few minutes I hit the button to call support. Someone tells me it's about ready to go. Ten minutes later it starts leaving. I have no idea why it took so long to start but it wasn't a great experience. If you (or anyone else from Cruise) can explain what was going on, that would settle the difference in experience to me.
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Waiting for someone to be ready to (actively) monitor it?
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This is a business with winner-take-all characteristics. Cruise was unlikely to leapfrog Waymo. So it makes the case for continuing to throw money at this very unconvincing. Cruise was always destined to be "like Waymo, but worse". Tesla, on the other hand, is taking a very different path than Waymo, they have a chance at beating Waymo at their own game and even if they don't beat Waymo, they can be a winner in some specific niche. (For the record, I'm a fan of Waymo.)
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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.
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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/
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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... !