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.
An electric air taxi by Joby Aviation flies near the Downtown Manhattan Heliport in Manhattan, New York City, U.S., November 12, 2023.
Roselle Chen | Reuters
Air taxi maker Joby Aviation in a new lawsuit accused competitor Archer Aviation of using stolen information by a former employee to “one-up” a partnership deal with a real estate developer.
“This is corporate espionage, planned and premeditated,” Joby said in the lawsuit filed Wednesday in a California Superior Court in Santa Cruz, where the company is based.
Archer and Joby did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.
The lawsuit alleges that former U.S. state and local policy lead, George Kivork, downloaded dozens of files and sent some content to his personal email two days before he resigned in July to take a job at Archer, which had recruited him.
By August, Joby said a partner that worked with Kivork said it had been approached by Archer with a “more lucrative deal.” Joby alleges that the eVTOL rival’s understanding of “highly confidential” details helped it leverage negotiations.
Joby also said the developer attempted to terminate the agreement, citing a breach of confidentiality.
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Kivork refused to return the files when Joby approached him after conducting an investigation, according to the suit. The company also said Archer denied wrongdoing, and would not disclose how it learned about the terms of the agreement or provide results from an internal investigation it allegedly undertook.
The lawsuit comes during a busy period for electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) technology as companies race to gain Federal Aviation Administration certification to start flying commercially. ‘
Joby argued in the complaint that it’s “imperative” to protect Joby’s work “from this type of espionage” to promote the sector’s success and ensure fair competition.
Last week, Joby said it completed its first test flight for a hybrid aircraft it’s working on with defense contractor L3Harris. This month, Amazon-backed Beta Technologies, another electric flight company, also went public on the New York Stock Exchange.
Joby shares have more than doubled over the last year, while Archer is up about 68%.
In August 2023, Archer settled a previous legal dispute with Boeing-owned Wisk Aero over the alleged theft of trade secrets. As part of the deal, Archer agreed to use Wisk as its autonomous tech partner.
Every weekday, the CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer releases the Homestretch — an actionable afternoon update, just in time for the last hour of trading on Wall Street. Markets : There was an ugly reversal in the market Thursday. Stocks soared for most of the morning in reaction to Nvidia ‘s strong quarter, bullish outlook on AI spending, and pushback that customers weren’t generating a sufficient return on their investment. Nvidia shares climbed as high as $196 on Thursday — a roughly 5% gain — and its gravitational pull helped lift other technology and AI-adjacent industrial stocks. The market’s gains pushed the S & P 500 into positive territory for the week. However, around 11 a.m. ET, the market began to fall rapidly, with technology and industrial names leading the decline. Nvidia gave up all of its gains and dropped 2%. Bitcoin hit its lowest level since late April. Notable defensive stocks like consumer staples held onto their gains, though. That resilience reinforces our decision to diversify further, which we did earlier this week , by adding Procter & Gamble to the portfolio. The S & P 500’s decline has pushed the index back toward the lows of its recent downturn, marking a roughly 5% pullback from its high. It remains to be seen whether Thursday’s reversal is a sign of investors continuing to retreat from risk assets or simply a retest of the recent downdraft. But Nvidia’s earnings report gave zero indication of a slowdown in demand for AI compute. Interest rate cut: Expectations for a 25-basis-point rate cut at the Federal Open Market Committee’s next meeting in December continue to fluctuate. One month ago, a rate cut seemed like a sure thing with a 98.8% probability, according to the CME FedWatch Tool . But the odds dropped to about 50% a week ago after a slew of hawkish commentary from Federal Reserve members. On Wednesday, the odds of a cut plummeted to 30% after the release of the October Fed minutes, which showed that the central bank was hesitant to lower rates again this year. But after the long-delayed September jobs data finally came out Thursday, the probability of a 25-basis-point reduction jumped to 40%. Although the economy added 119,000 jobs in September, more than double the forecasted figure, the unemployment rate ticked higher. The Fed is in a bind, trying to balance a softening labor market against the risk that a rate cut could reignite inflation. Up next: Gap, Ross Stores , Intuit , and Veeva Systems report after the closing bell. BJ’s Wholesale Club will post results Friday morning. On the economic data side, tomorrow we’ll get November’s S & P Global Flash PMI for Manufacturing and Services, along with the University of Michigan’s consumer sentiment survey. (See here for a full list of the stocks in Jim Cramer’s Charitable Trust.) As a subscriber to the CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer, you will receive a trade alert before Jim makes a trade. Jim waits 45 minutes after sending a trade alert before buying or selling a stock in his charitable trust’s portfolio. If Jim has talked about a stock on CNBC TV, he waits 72 hours after issuing the trade alert before executing the trade. THE ABOVE INVESTING CLUB INFORMATION IS SUBJECT TO OUR TERMS AND CONDITIONS AND PRIVACY POLICY , TOGETHER WITH OUR DISCLAIMER . NO FIDUCIARY OBLIGATION OR DUTY EXISTS, OR IS CREATED, BY VIRTUE OF YOUR RECEIPT OF ANY INFORMATION PROVIDED IN CONNECTION WITH THE INVESTING CLUB. NO SPECIFIC OUTCOME OR PROFIT IS GUARANTEED.
Bitcoin dropped on Thursday to levels not seen in more than six months, as investors appeared to pull back exposure to riskier assets and weighed the prospects of another Federal Reserve rate cut next month.
The flagship digital currency fell to as low as $86,325.81, its lowest level since April 21. It last traded at $86,690.11.
The release of stronger-than-expected U.S. jobs data raised questions about whether the central bank would lower its benchmark overnight rate. The U.S. economy added 119,000 in September, well above the 50,000 economists polled by Dow Jones expected.
That report sent the probability of a December rate cut to around 40%, according to the CME Group’s FedWatch tool.
Bitcoin’s pullback formed part of a broader cryptocurrency market decline. XRP was last down 2.3% on the day, and is below $2.00, while ether shed more than 3% to trade well below $3,000. Dogecoin was unchanged.
The world’s oldest crypto also led stocks lower, even after a blockbuster Nvidia earnings report. Traders who are heavily invested in AI-related stocks tend to also hold bitcoin, linking the two trades.
Bitcoin’s price has largely slid since a rash of cascading liquidations of highly leveraged crypto positions in early October.