With this decision, General Motors has announced that it will invest an additional $850 million in Cruise.
On Tuesday, Cruise, the driverless taxi service that General Motors has been struggling with, made the announcement that it will begin testing once more in the Houston area. Cruise made the announcement that they would initially use human taxi drivers to operate their vehicles, and then they would transition to “supervised autonomous driving with a safety driver behind the wheel in the coming weeks.”
The news made by Cruise came around the same time that Paul Jacobson, the chief financial officer of General Motors, made the announcement at the Global Auto Industry Conference held by Deutsche Bank in New York City. Jacobson stated that the automobile manufacturer would invest an additional $850 million into the robotaxi company in order to pay the operational costs.
General Motors has been nothing but a massive money trap with the Cruise brand. In the previous year, the business decided to stop operating its driverless taxis after one of its vehicles in its fleet in San Francisco collided with a pedestrian. The person had been thrown into the path of the driverless taxi by another vehicle, and the taxi eventually pulled them approximately 20 feet after they became pinned under its tire. The permits of the corporation were revoked by the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) of California less than a month after the violations occurred. After conducting an investigation into the accident, Cruise terminated the employment of nine of its executives, including Kyle Vogy, who was the business’s co-founder and chief executive officer (CEO). The company also laid off about a quarter of its personnel.
Since then, Cruise has gradually but steadily begun exhibiting new indications of life all over the place. The corporation made the announcement in April that it would begin the process of redeploying its services in Phoenix. The cars owned by Cruise will continue to be monitored and managed by humans, just like they were in Houston. In addition, the firm that operates autonomous taxis intends to extend its services to further cities by collaborating “with officials and community leaders,” as stated on the company’s blog. However, the company did not provide any specific schedule for when such extension may appear.
Updated at 5:45 p.m. Eastern Time on June 11: Immediately following its first publication, this story was revised to make it clear that Cruise’s return to Houston is currently restricted to testing purposes rather than picking up passengers.