After spending more than $10 billion on its robotaxi unit, General Motors is abandoning its Cruise driverless ride-hailing service.
The Detroit automaker on Tuesday said it will no longer fund its Cruise division’s robotaxi development and will instead fold the unit into its broader tech team. GM shares rose 2.3% in extended trading.
“Cruise was well on its way to a robotaxi business — but when you look at the fact you’re deploying a fleet, there’s a whole operations piece of doing that,” GM CEO Mary Barra said on a call Tuesday. Barra said GM would instead focus on the development of autonomous systems for use in personal vehicles.
GM cited the increasingly competitive robotaxi market, capital allocation priorities and the considerable time and resources necessary to grow the business as reasons for its decision.
The company will combine the majority-owned Cruise LLC with GM technical teams. Barra, who also serves as board chair of Cruise, said the companies have yet to determine how many employees will move to GM. Cruise has nearly 2,300 employees, a GM spokesperson told CNBC.
GM acquired Cruise in 2016. The automaker currently owns about 90% of Cruise and has agreements with other shareholders that will raise its ownership to more than 97%, GM said in a statement. GM anticipates it will complete the acquisition of remaining Cruise shares from outside shareholders by early 2025, CFO Paul Jacobson said Tuesday.
GM’s current annual expenditure on Cruise amounted to about $2 billion, and the restructuring would cut that by more than half, Jacobson said.
Honda, an outside investor in Cruise, told CNBC that it had planned to launch a driverless ride-hail service in Japan in early 2026, but will now re-assess those plans and make adjustments if needed.
“Honda remains committed to various research and development initiatives aimed at providing new mobility solutions to our customers in Japan,” a Honda spokesperson said on Tuesday. Honda said its total investment in Cruise was $852 million.
Cruise founder Kyle Vogt, who left the company in November 2023, posted on X after the announcement, “In case it was unclear before, it is clear now: GM are a bunch of dummies.”
An early entrant in the U.S. robotaxi market, Cruise grounded its driverless operations in October 2023, shortly before Vogt’s departure. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration fined Cruise $1.5 million after the company failed to disclose details of a serious crash that month involving a pedestrian.
A third-party probe into the incident ordered by GM and Cruise found that culture issues, ineptitude and poor leadership fueled regulatory oversights that led to the accident. The probe also investigated allegations of a cover-up by Cruise leadership but found no evidence to support those claims.
In July of this year, GM announced that it would indefinitely delay production of the Origin autonomous vehicle as its Cruise self-driving unit attempted to relaunch operations. At that point, Cruise began to focus on using the next-generation Chevrolet Bolt for development of its autonomous vehicles.
As Cruise’s operations were on hold, its robotaxi rivals gained ground.
Alphabet-owned Waymo has begun to operate commercial robotaxi services across several major U.S. metro areas, with the company last week announcing its plans to expand into Miami. Chinese autonomous vehicle makers including Pony.ai and WeRide have rolled out in overseas markets as well.
Tesla, meanwhile, showed off design concepts for a self-driving Cybercab at an event in October. Tesla still classifies the Autopilot and Full Self-Driving software in its vehicles as “partially automated driving systems,” which require a human to be ready to steer or brake at all times. In an October earnings call, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the company will launch a self-driving ride-hailing service in California and Texas as early as 2025.
SoftBank-funded Wayve is testing its autonomous vehicles in San Francisco, and Amazon-owned Zoox is also testing its autonomous vehicles, which do not feature steering wheels, in several U.S. cities including San Francisco.
SoftBank’s Vision Fund was also an investor in Cruise, with a nearly 20% stake, until GM repurchased the shares for $2.1 billion in 2022.
Alphabet and Tesla climbed to fresh records on Wednesday, closing at all-time highs alongside Amazon and Meta as the tech megacaps lifted the Nasdaq past 20,000 for the first time.
Tech’s seven trillion-dollar companies added roughly $416 billion in market cap for the day.
For Alphabet, the two-day 11% rally was driven by the company’s launch of its latest quantum computing chip, which it revealed on Monday and described as a “breakthrough” and “an important step in our journey to build a useful quantum computer with practical applications” in drug discovery, battery design and other areas.
Alphabet closed at $195.40 on Wednesday, topping its prior high of $191.18, which it reached on July 10.
Tesla had been below its previous record for much longer. Shares of the electric vehicle maker jumped almost 6% on Wednesday to $424.77, climbing above their prior closing high of $409.97 on Nov. 4, 2021. The stock has soared 69% since Donald Trump’s election victory last month, on Wall Street’s optimism that Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s cozy relationship with the incoming president will pay dividends.
Amazon, Apple and Meta have all been regularly reaching new highs, though Apple slipped 0.5% on Wednesday. Microsoft, meanwhile, is about 4% below its high reached in July, and chipmaker Nvidia is 6% off its record from last month.
The outsized weighting of tech’s megacaps has pushed the Nasdaq to a 33% gain for the year. The index rose 1.8% on Wednesday to close at an all-time high of 20,034.89.
The market has rallied since Trump’s victory on Nov. 4, partly on expectations that the new administration will dial down regulatory pressure on the tech industry and allow for more dealmaking.
On Tuesday, Trump named Andrew Ferguson as the next chair of the Federal Trade Commission, replacing Lina Khan, who is best known for blocking the top tech companies’ acquisition efforts. Ferguson, currently one of the FTC’s five commissioners, “will be the most America First, and pro-innovation FTC Chair in our Country’s History,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post.
Tom Lee, managing partner at Fundstrat Global Advisors, told CNBC’s “Closing Bell” that investors see more gains in tech with the expectation that a Federal Reserve rate cut is coming this month. The consumer price index showed a 12-month inflation rate of 2.7% in November, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported on Wednesday, further solidifying the market outlook for a cut.
“We know that when interest rates fall, the megacaps actually are very sensitive to that, and I think today was a day where the odds of a December cut increased,” Lee said. “That’s actually bullish for tech.”
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta Platforms, during the Meta Connect event in Menlo Park, California, on Sept. 25, 2024.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Meta’s family of apps including Facebook and Instagram were down on Wednesday, resulting in users being unable to access the services.
The widespread outages began around 9:57 a.m. PST and affected the social media company’s core apps as well as Threads, WhatsApp and Messenger, according to user-submitted reports gathered by the internet-monitoring site Downdetector.
More than 100,000 users experienced problems using the Facebook service at 10:11 a.m. PST, representing the peak of the outages, according to Downdetector.
Meta acknowledged the outage via a post on social media site X, saying =the company is “aware that a technical issue is impacting some users’ ability to access our apps.”
“We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible and apologize for any inconvenience,” the X post said.
A separate Instagram-specific X post also acknowledged the outage, and said the company recognizes “there’s a technical issue impacting some people’s ability to access Instagram.”
Meta’s various apps experienced a roughly two-hour outage in March 2024, on the same day as the Super Tuesday U.S. presidential primaries.
U.S. President-elect Donald Trump and Elon Musk watch the launch of the sixth test flight of the SpaceX Starship rocket in Brownsville, Texas, on Nov. 19, 2024.
Brandon Bell | Via Reuters
Tesla shares jumped to an all-time high on Wednesday, surpassing their prior record reached in 2021, sparked by a post-election rally and Wall Street’s increased enthusiasm for Elon Musk’s electric vehicle company.
The stock rose to an intraday high of $415, which is 50 cents above its previous peak, and was on pace to close ahead of its highest finish, which was $409.97 on Nov. 4, 2021.
Tesla’s market value has swelled by about 66% this year, with almost all of those gains coming since Donald Trump’s election victory early last month. The stock’s 38% rally in November marked its best monthly performance since January of 2023 and its 10th best on record.
Musk poured $277 million into a pro-Trump campaign effort, according to Federal Election Commission filings, and turned his support for the Republican nominee into another full-time job ahead of the election, funding a swing-state operation to register voters and using his social media platform X to constantly tout his preferred candidate, frequently with misinformation.
The world’s richest person, who’s seen his net worth swell to over $360 billion, is set to lead the Trump administration’s “Department of Government Efficiency,” alongside onetime Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy.
His new role could give Musk power over federal agencies’ budgets, staffing and the ability to push for the elimination of inconvenient regulations. Musk said during a Tesla earnings call in October that he intended to use his sway with Trump to establish a “federal approval process for autonomous vehicles.” Currently, approvals happen at the state level.
“The stock is responding to the Trump bump,” Craig Irwin, an analyst at Roth MKM, told CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” last week. Irwin had just increased his price target to $380 from $85, writing in a report that “Musk’s authentic support for Trump likely doubled Tesla’s pool of enthusiasts and lifted credibility for a demand inflection.”
On Wednesday, analysts at Goldman Sachs boosted their price target on Tesla, joining a parade of firms that have lifted their price expectation or their rating on the stock. The Goldman analysts wrote that “the market is taking a more forward-looking approach to Tesla, including with respect to its AI opportunity.”
Analysts at Morgan Stanley and Bank of America have also issued bullish reports of late.
Since Trump’s victory, Musk has been accompanying the president-elect in meetings with world leaders, and began advising him and members of Congress as to which federal agencies, regulations and budget items the billionaire would like to eliminate or greatly reduce.
Tesla’s surge to a record marks a dramatic turn from its performance to start the year. The company’s shares plunged 29% in the first three months of 2024, the worst quarter for the stock since the end of 2022 and the third worst since Tesla went public in 2010. At the time, investors were concerned about Tesla’s core business, which reported declining revenue in the first quarter in part due to increased competition from China.
In its third-quarter earnings report in October, Tesla reported a year-over-year revenue increase of 8%, which fell just shy of estimates. However, the company reported better-than-expected profit, and Musk said on the earnings call that his “best guess” is that “vehicle growth” will reach 20% to 30% next year, due to “lower cost vehicles” and the “advent of autonomy.” That forecast was ahead of analysts’ predictions.