Not surprisingly, GM’s Cruise robotaxi service veered off course over a year ago following a major accident in San Francisco, leading to the loss of its operating rights in the city. Shortly after, the company cut around a quarter of its workforce. Yesterday, GM’s announced it was shutting down the entire project, despite having invested a significant amount.

General Motors said on Tuesday that it would stop developing a taxi that can drive itself, ending a yearslong project that the company spent billions of dollars on and leaving the field to competitors like Tesla, Amazon and Waymo.

The automaker said it would fold its Cruise subsidiary, which was working on that project, into its main operations, allowing formerly separate development teams to jointly develop fully autonomous vehicles for private owners.

The decision removes G.M. from a business that some in the industry believe could someday be worth hundreds of billions of dollars, if researchers can solve formidable technological hurdles. Elon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla, and other Silicon Valley executives have sketched a future where thousands of driverless cars ferry passengers to destinations.

But Mary T. Barra, the chief executive of G.M., suggested that the payoff was too far in the future to justify the expense of developing the technology, which has already cost the company $10 billion.

“You have to understand the cost of running a robotaxi fleet, which is not our core business and is very expensive,” she said during a conference call with Wall Street analysts on Tuesday.

One would think that if a product is not worth manufacturing it would be decided prior to spending $10 billion. It is good GM finally realized that it had to cut costs and put their Robotaxi project on the chopping block before any more money was wasted. Unfortunately, job cuts usually follow project cancelations.

An event that obviously triggered the Robotaxi’s demise was a couple of accidents in San Francisco, one of which left a pedestrian seriously injured.

Cruise further worsened the situation by essentially misleading the NHTSA about the incident.

In October 2023, one of Cruise’s robotaxi ran over a pedestrian in San Francisco. The vehicle did not detect the person was underneath the vehicle and then attempted to pull over, in turn dragging the victim 20 feet. However, the pedestrian had initially been hit by a human-driven car and landed on the path of a Cruise robotaxi.

Per the DOJ, the General Motors-owned company filed documents with the NHTSA, as federal regulations required, but omitted that the robotaxi dragged the person.

Fortunately, the victim survived and filed a lawsuit against Cruise, which was reportedly settled for around $10 million.

Creating functional driverless cars involves replicating the complex capabilities of the human brain, a challenging, resource-intensive, and expensive task. A taxi or limousine can already take you from point A to point B without the need for you to drive.

While it makes no sense nor could it be economical to have a vehicle do the driving for someone, this is another unicorn boondoggle trying to depersonalize transportation in order to allegedly fight climate change. Not only is a lot of money no longer around that GM could be put to better use, but it also nearly cost someone’s life for GM to realize it was all a mistake.

PHOTO CREDIT: Pixabay