Cruise (autonomous vehicle)

Based on Wikipedia: Cruise (autonomous vehicle)

The Rise and Fall of a Self-Driving Dream

In October 2023, a self-driving car in San Francisco struck a pedestrian who had already been hit by another vehicle. What happened next would unravel one of the most ambitious autonomous vehicle programs in the world.

The car, operated by a company called Cruise, dragged the injured pedestrian twenty feet before coming to a stop. Within days, California regulators suspended Cruise's permits. Within weeks, the company halted operations nationwide. Within a month, its founder and chief executive officer resigned. And just over a year later, General Motors—the century-old automaker that had poured billions into making Cruise the future of transportation—pulled the plug entirely.

This is the story of how a scrappy startup with forty employees became a thirty-billion-dollar company, promised to revolutionize urban mobility, and then collapsed under the weight of its own ambitions and a single catastrophic incident.

From Garage Project to GM Acquisition

Cruise began in 2013 with a remarkably modest goal. Kyle Vogt and Dan Kan didn't set out to build fully autonomous vehicles. They wanted to sell a ten-thousand-dollar kit that would let Audi owners cruise hands-free on the highway.

The product, called RP-1, was essentially a sophisticated autopilot system. A roof-mounted sensor pod packed with cameras, radar, and GPS would connect to your car's steering, throttle, and brakes. Activate it on a limited-access highway, and the system would maintain your speed, keep a safe following distance, and hold your lane.

Fifty customers put down thousand-dollar deposits.

But Vogt and Kan quickly realized they were thinking too small. Highway driving, with its predictable lanes and limited variables, was actually the easier problem. The real challenge—and the real opportunity—lay in conquering city streets. In January 2014, just months after announcing the RP-1, Cruise abandoned the product entirely and pivoted to building fully autonomous vehicles.

This pivot caught the attention of Y Combinator, the legendary startup accelerator that had launched companies like Airbnb and Dropbox. Cruise graduated from the program in 2015, the same year they secured a permit from California to test self-driving technology on public roads.

Then General Motors came calling.

The exact acquisition price has never been confirmed. Reports ranged from "north of five hundred million dollars" to over a billion. What is certain is that in March 2016, GM bought Cruise and its roughly forty employees, betting that this small San Francisco startup held the key to the automotive giant's autonomous future.

The Unusual Marriage

Corporate acquisitions often kill the thing they're trying to buy. A nimble startup gets absorbed into bureaucratic processes, its best people leave, and its innovative culture suffocates under layers of corporate approval chains.

GM and Cruise tried to avoid this fate through an unusual arrangement. Rather than folding Cruise into GM's existing operations, the automaker let the startup remain largely independent. Cruise kept responsibility for both developing the technology and bringing it to market. This autonomy was deliberate—GM's chief executive officer Mary Barra explicitly acknowledged the dangers of a large company smothering an acquired startup.

The approach seemed to work. Cruise grew rapidly. By September 2016, the team had expanded from forty to over a hundred employees. By mid-2017, they had nearly two hundred. The company began testing modified Chevrolet Bolts—GM's all-electric compact car—on the streets of San Francisco, Scottsdale, and Detroit.

In July 2017, Vogt released videos showing Cruise vehicles navigating San Francisco's notoriously challenging streets. He called them "the most technically advanced demonstrations of self-driving cars that have ever been put out there in public." The videos showed cars handling the city's steep hills, cable car tracks, aggressive cyclists, jaywalking pedestrians, and double-parked delivery trucks.

Money began pouring in.

The Billions Arrive

The scale of investment in Cruise is almost difficult to comprehend.

In May 2018, SoftBank's Vision Fund committed two and a quarter billion dollars. GM added another billion of its own. Five months later, Honda invested seven hundred fifty million, with a promise of two billion more over the following twelve years.

By May 2019, Cruise had raised additional funding that brought its valuation to nineteen billion dollars. In January 2021, a consortium including Microsoft and Honda pushed another two billion in, valuing the company at thirty billion.

To put this in perspective, thirty billion dollars was more than the entire market capitalization of many traditional automakers. Investors were betting that a company with no revenue and no commercial product would be worth more than century-old car manufacturers that sold millions of vehicles annually.

The bet rested on a simple premise: whoever won the autonomous vehicle race would dominate the future of transportation. Personal car ownership would give way to fleets of robotaxis, summoned by smartphone and cheaper than driving yourself. Cities would be transformed. Parking lots would become parks. Traffic deaths—over forty thousand annually in the United States alone—would plummet toward zero.

Cruise wasn't just building a product. It was building the future.

The Origin of a New Vehicle

In January 2020, Cruise unveiled something remarkable: a vehicle designed from scratch to have no driver at all.

The Cruise Origin looked like nothing on the road. It had no steering wheel. No pedals. No driver's seat. Instead, it featured two bench seats facing each other, like a small living room on wheels. The design made sense only if you believed that autonomous driving was no longer a question of if, but when.

The vehicle was classified as Level Four on the Society of Automotive Engineers' automation scale, which runs from zero (no automation) to five (full automation in all conditions). Level Four means a vehicle can drive itself in specific conditions without any human intervention—the car handles everything, and passengers are just that: passengers.

Cruise claimed the Origin would cost around fifty thousand dollars to manufacture at scale and last for one million miles. Built on GM's new electric vehicle platform using advanced Ultium battery technology, it was designed specifically for fleet deployment in ride-hailing services.

Honda saw the potential and announced a partnership to bring the Origin to Japan. By late 2022, a prototype of the Japanese version was testing in Tokyo. GM promised mass production would begin in 2023.

But there was a problem. Because the Origin lacked traditional controls, it couldn't legally operate on American roads without a special exemption from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, known as NHTSA. Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards assume cars have steering wheels and brake pedals. The Origin had neither.

Cruise petitioned for an exemption in February 2022. By September 2023, they were still waiting.

Meanwhile, the Robotaxis Roll

While the Origin awaited regulatory approval, Cruise pushed forward with its existing fleet of modified Chevrolet Bolts.

September 2021 marked a milestone: California granted Cruise a permit to operate driverless taxis without human safety drivers. Previously, every autonomous vehicle on California roads had required a trained employee sitting behind the wheel, ready to take over if something went wrong. Now Cruise could remove that human backstop entirely.

In November 2021, Kyle Vogt took the first completely driverless ride in company history. By February 2022, the service opened to the public. In June, California issued Cruise the state's first-ever Driverless Deployment Permit, allowing the company to actually charge money for rides.

This was historic. Cruise became the first company to offer paid rides without a driver in a major American city.

The fleet grew. By September 2022, one hundred robotaxis operated in San Francisco, with plans to expand to five thousand. Cruise announced it would launch in Phoenix, Austin, Dallas, Houston, and Miami. The company projected one billion dollars in revenue by 2025 and an astonishing fifty billion by 2030.

But cracks were forming.

The Cones of Rebellion

San Francisco residents had opinions about the robots driving through their neighborhoods.

Cruise vehicles had developed an annoying habit. They would sometimes stop unexpectedly in traffic lanes—not because of an emergency, but because their software became confused or cautious. These unplanned stops blocked traffic, delayed buses, and frustrated anyone stuck behind a car with no one to honk at.

Worse, the cars occasionally wandered into active emergency scenes. Firefighters reported Cruise vehicles intruding on fire suppression operations, creating additional hazards in already dangerous situations.

In January 2023, the City of San Francisco formally asked state regulators to deny Cruise's application to expand its operating hours. The city cited specific problems: "unplanned and unexpected stops in travel lanes, where they obstruct traffic and transit service, and intruding into active emergency response scenes, including fire suppression scenes, creating additional hazardous conditions."

A grassroots protest movement emerged with a brilliantly simple tactic. A group called Safe Street Rebel discovered that placing an ordinary traffic cone on the hood of a Cruise vehicle would confuse its sensors and immobilize it. In July 2023, they published a viral video demonstrating the technique and announced a "Week of Cone" to highlight their concerns.

The cone protests were clever street theater, but they pointed to a deeper issue. The vehicles were operating in a complex urban environment alongside skeptical humans, and the relationship was fraying.

August 2023: Full Speed Ahead

Despite the growing friction, California regulators granted Cruise something extraordinary in August 2023: permission to operate twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, anywhere in San Francisco. The California Public Utilities Commission approved the expansion over the City of San Francisco's explicit objections.

Cruise had won.

The company now had around four thousand employees. Its vehicles offered driverless rides around the clock across an entire major city. The vision of ubiquitous autonomous transportation seemed closer than ever.

Two months later, everything collapsed.

The Incident

On the night of October 2, 2023, a pedestrian was struck by a hit-and-run driver in San Francisco. The impact threw her into an adjacent lane, directly into the path of a Cruise robotaxi.

The Cruise vehicle hit her.

Then, in an apparent attempt to pull over safely—the standard response its software had been programmed to execute after a collision—the car continued forward, dragging the injured woman roughly twenty feet before stopping.

The California Department of Motor Vehicles launched an immediate investigation. What they found was damning. Not just the technical failure of a vehicle that dragged a person down the street, but a pattern of how Cruise had communicated—or failed to communicate—with regulators about the incident.

On October 24, the DMV suspended all of Cruise's self-driving permits in California, effective immediately. The agency cited both the collision itself and concerns about whether Cruise had been forthcoming about what happened.

Three days later, Cruise voluntarily halted all robotaxi operations across the United States. Phoenix, Austin, Dallas, Houston, Miami—all shut down.

The Unraveling

The next few weeks brought a cascade of bad news.

On November 8, Cruise announced a recall of nine hundred fifty vehicles. The fix would come through an over-the-air software update—the modern equivalent of a traditional recall, where code rather than physical parts gets replaced.

The following day, the company laid off an unspecified number of contract workers who had supported autonomous vehicle operations. These were the people who monitored vehicles remotely, assisted confused robotaxis, and provided the human backup that supposedly wasn't needed anymore.

On November 19, Kyle Vogt resigned. The founder and chief executive officer who had pivoted Cruise from a highway autopilot kit to a thirty-billion-dollar autonomous vehicle company walked away. GM appointed two interim leaders: the company's engineering chief and GM's own general counsel.

GM also paused production of the Origin, the revolutionary vehicle without a steering wheel that was supposed to define the future of transportation.

An internal investigation, conducted by the law firm Quinn Emanuel Urquhart and Sullivan and released in January 2024, concluded that the DMV's suspension was "largely the result of deficient leadership at Cruise." The company remained under investigation by both the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The End of the Road

For a year, Cruise limped along. In May 2024, vehicles tentatively returned to public roads. In June, the company hired Marc Whitten, a former Amazon and Microsoft executive, as its new chief executive officer.

But the damage was done.

In December 2024, General Motors announced it would stop funding Cruise as an autonomous taxi company. The vision of a fleet of driverless vehicles transforming urban transportation was officially dead.

Instead, GM would fold Cruise's technology into its existing advanced driver assistance systems—features like Super Cruise that help human drivers on highways, not replace them entirely. The autonomous taxi dream would become highway autopilot features. The revolutionary Origin would never see mass production.

The merger of Cruise back into GM was completed in February 2025. After nearly a decade of independence, billions in investment, and a brief moment as the most advanced robotaxi service in the world, Cruise ceased to exist as a separate entity.

What Cruise Tells Us About Autonomous Driving

The Cruise story illuminates several uncomfortable truths about self-driving technology.

First, the gap between impressive demonstrations and reliable deployment is enormous. Cruise's 2017 videos showed vehicles handling complex San Francisco streets with apparent ease. Six years and tens of billions of dollars later, the technology still wasn't ready for unsupervised operation in that same city.

Second, edge cases matter enormously. Autonomous vehicles can handle routine situations well. But cities are full of non-routine situations: a pedestrian already lying injured in the road, a fire truck blocking a lane, a protest march rerouting traffic. Each edge case requires either pre-programmed responses or real-time decision-making, and the number of possible edge cases approaches infinity.

Third, public acceptance is fragile. Cruise's vehicles were involved in a minuscule fraction of San Francisco's traffic incidents. But autonomous vehicles are held to a different standard than human drivers. When a human makes a fatal error, we accept it as tragic but normal. When a robot makes the same error, we question whether the entire technology should exist.

Fourth, the economics remain uncertain. Cruise lost over half a billion dollars in a single quarter while generating almost no revenue. The company's projections of fifty billion in annual revenue by 2030 now seem like fantasy. But even modest profitability proved elusive.

The Competitors

Cruise's collapse doesn't mean the autonomous vehicle industry is dead. Waymo, the self-driving company spun out of Google, continues to operate robotaxi services. Tesla promises its Full Self-Driving technology is approaching true autonomy. Chinese companies like Baidu and AutoX are deploying vehicles in cities across Asia.

But Cruise's failure suggests the timeline for widespread autonomous vehicles may be longer than optimists predicted. And it raises questions about whether the robotaxi model—replacing human drivers with robots in dense urban environments—is the right first application for the technology.

Perhaps autonomous driving will come first to highways, where conditions are more predictable. Perhaps it will arrive in controlled environments like airports, campuses, or retirement communities. Perhaps it will require vehicle-to-infrastructure communication systems that don't yet exist.

Or perhaps a company will crack the problem in ways Cruise couldn't, and robotaxis will proliferate within the decade.

A Postscript

In December 2025—a year after shutting down Cruise—GM appeared to have second thoughts. The company hired a former Tesla executive to lead a renewed push into autonomous vehicles.

The dream, it seems, refuses to die entirely. The question is whether anyone can turn it into reality.

For now, the streets of San Francisco have fewer robots and more human drivers. The future arrived, operated briefly, and retreated. The next attempt awaits.