Cruise, General Motors’ autonomous driving subsidiary, started taking passengers in its self-driving taxis in San Francisco this week. For now, the rides are still free, but in the future General Motors expects significant annual sales from Cruise.
For the taxi rides, Cruise currently uses Chevrolet Bolts with various sensors on their roof. The taxi driver is no longer involved at all, because Cruise will actually carry out the journeys without a driver. At the end of 2020, it received a permit for this in San Francisco. Kyle Vogt, interim CEO at the company, writes in a blog post that the driverless rides are free for the time being. Through the website you can book a taxi ride. According to Vogt, Cruise starts with a small number of users and gradually expands the fleet with more cars.
The milestone for Cruise comes with an additional investment: The ‘SoftBank Vision Fund’ will inject an additional $1.35 billion into Cruise, on top of the initial investment of $796 million that the investment fund will make in 2018. already did in the autonomous branch of GM. GM, in turn, invested an additional $1.77 billion in Cruise in early 2021, along with Microsoft. People are therefore confident that the autonomous taxi will one day become a reality.
At a later stage, Cruise wants to drive his own autonomous taxi: the Cruise Origin. GM said in a statement to its earnings this week that it expects $50 billion in sales from Cruise by the end of the decade. Whether that will work remains to be seen, because so far the realization of Cruise’s plans has taken longer than expected.
– Thanks for information from Autoweek.nl