General Motors has announced that it will stop funding the development of the Cruise self-driving taxi.
The company says it will now “refocus autonomous driving development on personal vehicles”.
GM also pointed to the increasingly competitive robotaxi market as a reason for the move.
In October, Tesla boss Elon Musk unveiled the electric car giant’s long-awaited robotaxi, the Cybercab, at the Warner Bros Studios in Burbank, California.
Tesla is gearing up to reveal its Robotaxi this Thursday, and everyone wants to know what it will look like, whether Tesla will unveil a commercialization strategy, and what outrageous timelines Elon Musk might announce to bump Tesla’s stock.
The “We, Robot” event will take place at 7 p.m. PT at Warner Bros. Discovery’s movie studio in Burbank, California, and we’ve got details on how to watch it here.
Musk had originally planned to reveal the Robotaxi – which he has also referred to as a Cybercab – on August 8. That’s a deadline Musk set for himself and Tesla a few hours after a Reuters report found that the automaker shelved its plan to build a lower-cost EV and would instead focus its resources on a robotaxi.
IN 2015, THEN Uber CEO Travis Kalanick pulled off a bold talent raid when he poached some 40 roboticists from the National Robotics Engineering Center at Carnegie Mellon. The move reportedly left the world-class engineering university reeling, and it seemed to signal that the world’s hottest startup was on the cusp of making self-driving cars a reality.
Now, that self-driving unit is no more, and the estimated timeline for robotaxi domination has extended well into this decade. Uber said Monday it would sell off the self-driving unit that was the result of that raid, the Pittsburgh-based Advanced Technologies Group. The 1,200-person unit will be acquired by the self-driving-tech developer Aurora. Uber will invest $400 million in Aurora as part of the deal, bringing Aurora’s valuation to $10 billion and tripling its workforce. Uber’s current CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi, will also take a seat on Aurora’s board.
Dispatches From The Front 