At a sprawling complex in Warren, Michigan, General Motors’ hopes for a self-driving future are brought to life through virtual-reality headsets available to visitors.
The video shows an electric and autonomous vehicle driving itself. Wirelessly connected to traffic lights and the surrounding roads, the car can avoid collisions and reduce congestion — part of what GM calls its “0-0-0” vision (zero crashes, zero emissions and zero congestion).
At least, that’s the plan. GM’s self-driving future seems much more distant today than it was a year ago, when Cruise, the company’s self-driving car subsidiary, was focused on aggressively expanding its robotaxi service, testing it in 15 cities in 10 states.
On October 2, a Cruise self-driving car struck a pedestrian on a San Francisco street, dragging him 20 feet, severely injuring him. A few weeks later, the California Department of Transportation accused Cruise of omitting the drag from video of the accident that was originally provided to the department, and suspended the company’s license in the state.
Cruise voluntarily suspended operations across the US in November amid widespread criticism that it was skimping on safety as it expanded its driverless taxi services. Cruise also fired nine executives, its CEO resigned and laid off a quarter of its workforce.
Now comes the hard part: rebuilding its tarnished reputation. In recent interviews with The New York Times, the three executives who currently run Cruise said they’re in no rush to get back in business. Having learned firsthand the dangers of rushing cutting-edge technology, Cruise has slowed its breakneck development to avoid another major accident.
“Cruise has always moved really quickly, whereas other competitors have not,” said Craig Glidden, who became Cruise’s president and chief administrative officer in November. Safety is now Cruise’s “North Star,” he said.
But going slowly means the company risks falling far behind its leading rivals. Waymo, a subsidiary of Google parent Alphabet, has been operating driverless taxis in the Phoenix area since 2020 and in San Francisco since late 2022 without any major accidents, and recently expanded to Los Angeles. Amazon subsidiary Zoox has been testing steering-wheel-less robot taxis in Las Vegas since June last year.
“It will take them three to five years at best to catch up technologically with Waymo,” said Alex Roy, a consultant and former executive in the self-driving car industry, adding that it will be even harder for Cruise to catch up commercially because Waymo “makes its money off the trust that Cruise never earned.”
Some industry observers were surprised that GM didn’t shut down Cruise after its debacle in its initial public offering late last year. GM has spent more than $8 billion on its self-driving subsidiary since acquiring the company in 2016. Cruise lost $3.48 billion last year and is expected to lose another $519 million in the first three months of 2024.
“We thought the most likely scenario was that cruise would be shut down completely sometime in late 2023, early 2024,” said Riley Brennan, a partner at Trax Venture Capital, which invests in the future of transportation.
But after slashing Cruise’s fiscal 2024 budget by $1 billion, GM Chief Executive Mary T. Barra reiterated her commitment to the company on an earnings call. She told investors in April that Cruise had made “measurable progress,” but GM was considering various options for financing the business, including accepting outside investment.
After Cruise’s former CEO and co-founder Kyle Vogt resigned in November, GM appointed two presidents reporting to the board: Mo El-Shenawy, who was the company’s executive vice president of engineering, and Glidden, who also serves as GM’s general counsel. Cruise hired veteran product safety executive Steve Kenner as its chief safety officer in February.
The three executives make safety decisions, such as when to take the next steps in deployment, and Kenner said those decisions must be unanimous.
So far, Cruise has been taking small steps toward returning to public roads. In April, it chose Phoenix, where its operations center is located, as the first city to resume testing with human drivers. After driving a few vehicles for a month to understand the characteristics of local roads, Cruise moved to supervised self-driving tests on May 13 with two safety drivers per vehicle.
Cruise said its robot taxis are, on average, safer than human drivers. But they suffer from edge cases, like road construction or erratic bicyclists who handle the kinds of accidents that humans instinctively handle. El Shenawy said the robot taxis have gotten better at navigating construction sites and dealing with emergency vehicles.
Glidden said Cruise hopes to offer driverless rides in one city by the end of 2024 and have safe drivers in fewer than five cities, assuming edge-case issues are resolved.
While El Shenawy’s engineering team works to improve the technology, Glidden and Kenner have been traveling around the country to meet with regulators. Cruise has met with local and state regulators in Arizona, Texas and California, as well as the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. It has also spoken with several cities in the Southeast where it previously tested its vehicles.
In California, Cruise is answering questions from state officials about its self-driving tests but it’s unclear if or when it will be able to re-obtain its permit. Executives have said they plan to stay in the state because the Silicon Valley talent pool is vital to Cruise’s business.
It’s questionable whether Cruise’s cautious approach will restore regulators’ confidence in the company. California Sen. Dave Cortese, who represents Silicon Valley, said the self-driving car industry’s aggressive testing on public roads in the past “created tension and mistrust.”
To convince regulators, the company needs a “demonstration of radical transparency” that an incident like October 2 will never happen again, consultant Roy said.
“I think there’s a lot of things we can agree on, even if we may not agree on them,” said Tilly Chan, executive director of the San Francisco County Transportation Agency, “but we’re not sure what it would take to bring them back.”
