Owned Argo.ai, Volkswagen once supported Aurora and so on.
At present, it seems that this is a win-win situation. It has solved the urgent need for money-burning autopilot startups, and it has also met the strong demand of traditional car companies for autopilot technology and electrification: this year, whoever is at odds The cutting edge of cutting-edge technology is almost equivalent to being completely abandoned by the times.
Cruise was established in San Francisco in October 2013. After being acquired by General Motors for $1 billion in 2016, it became a subsidiary of General Motors that develops autonomous vehicles and shared services. In 2018, former General Motors President Dan Ammann (Dan Ammann) became Cruise CEO. This is also considered to be a performance of GM’s emphasis on autonomous driving research and development.
From June 2018 to May 2019, Cruise has successively introduced the SoftBank Vision Fund, Honda Automobile and other institutions, with a cumulative financing amount of US$7.25 billion.
At the beginning of its creation, Cruise was committed to developing a direct-to-consumer self-driving kit, which realized self-driving by modifying vehicles. After 2015, Cruise changed its strategy and started writing software for fully autonomous vehicles, and proposed to reduce the number of accidents and traffic congestion in big cities through shared travel.
Compared to other autonomous driving companies, Cruise is more focused on solving the urban environment, testing on the complex and changeable streets of San Francisco.
Founder Kyle Vogt stated in his blog, “Testing in the most difficult places means we will expand faster than starting in the simple places”. By testing in densely populated, complex and changeable areas, the software is more exposed to abnormal situations, which means that cars and scenes can have more interactions, which is more efficient than in sparsely populated suburbs and closed roads.
The report released by the California Department of Motor Vehicles in 2020 shows that the average mileage of Cruise’s autonomous driving is second only to Waymo, with 831,000 miles of road test, and 0.082 manual takeovers per 1,000 miles, which is very similar to Waymo’s 0,076. Close.
The strong ability to attract funds and the R&D progress in the first echelon proves that GM’s acquisition of Cruise is one of the smartest investment decisions in recent years.
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