Cruise

» see getcruise.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

cruise was never going to reach ankara. we do not have the road-network licensing regime for robotaxis, and the turkish car market runs on a different set of assumptions about human liability. this is a US west-coast story from start to finish. what i tracked from a distance was the funding number. GM had put roughly $10 billion into cruise across the life of the program, softbank had put another $2 billion in and out, honda had joined and then partially exited. it was one of the most expensive attempts at driverless ever mounted by a legacy carmaker.

kyle vogt and daniel kan founded cruise automation in october '13 in san francisco. GM acquired the company in march 2016 for a reported $500 million to $1 billion cash-plus-equity range. the pitch inside GM was that autonomy was the next platform shift and legacy carmakers who did not own the stack would end up as commodity chassis suppliers to whichever tech company won the layer above.

by 2022 cruise had california permits to operate driverless in san francisco. by mid-2023 it was running a paid public service 24 hours across a chunk of the city, with a small phoenix operation attached. i literally was not in that geography during any of it. the 2 october 2023 incident is the moment the story pivots and everything else that follows is downstream of it.

~ the record ~

~ the pedestrian drag ~

the sequence on 2 october '23 was that a pedestrian was struck by a human-driven car in san francisco and knocked into the path of a cruise robotaxi. the cruise vehicle initially stopped. it then attempted a pull-over manoeuvre and, unaware that a person was pinned underneath, dragged her about 20 feet before coming to rest. she survived with severe injuries.

the reputational damage was compounded by the disclosure sequence. the california DMV alleged that cruise did not disclose the full footage of the pull-over portion to regulators in the initial briefings. cruise disputed the framing. the DMV pulled the driverless permits on 24 october '23, three weeks after the incident. cruise halted operations nationwide three days after that.

~ how it actually ended ~

kyle vogt resigned on 19 november '23. GM appointed marc whitten as ceo on 25 june '24. the company laid off about a quarter of its staff across two rounds in 2024 and tried to restart supervised testing with human drivers in a small number of cities. a series of missed regulatory milestones followed through the second half of the year.

on 10 december 2024 GM announced it would stop funding cruise as a robotaxi program. the work would be reassigned into GM's advanced driver-assistance systems group, which is a completely different product category. the robotaxi bet was over. GM took the writedown and folded the intellectual property into a suite that ships inside chevrolet and cadillac cars. it quietly stopped talking about level-four autonomy in its public communications.

~ what got buried with it ~

in fairness, cruise's technical stack had genuine progress inside it. the perception system for dense urban environments was competitive with waymo's, the driverless miles-per-intervention number for a specific san francisco geography was industry-leading during the summer of '23. the ~$10 billion GM put in bought engineering that would probably have been worth something to a company organised differently.

in those days the robotaxi category as a whole was already narrowing. argo ai had shut down in october '22 when ford and volkswagen stopped funding. cruise's closure in december '24 left waymo as the last well-funded us robotaxi programme still operating a public service. the alphabet-scale-money-plus-full-decade-of-runway pattern turned out to be a much narrower moat than the venture rounds of 2018 had implied.

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