Why did General Motors stop the self-driving taxi project?

General Motors announced that it will halt its efforts to develop a fleet of driverless taxis and will focus on driver-assistance features that require the driver to be ready to control the vehicle, according to what CNN reported.

Abandoning self-driving taxis

The company said: “General Motors has decided to abandon efforts to develop automated taxis due to the significant time and resources that will be required to expand the business, coupled with the increasingly competitive automated taxi market.”
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The Detroit-based automaker’s effort into robotaxis was run by a company called Cruise, which is 90% owned by General Motors.
Consequently, a number of Cruise employees who worked on self-driving technology will be transferred to General Motors to work on driver-assistance features for special cars such as Super Cruise, which enables a driverless driving feature and is now offered in more than 20 GM vehicles.

Reducing GM costs

GM said the move will reduce costs by $1 billion annually after the merger is complete.
General Motors said it would focus on driver-assistance features rather than fully autonomous vehicles, adding that developing a fleet of automated taxis would require more than $10 billion.

Competition in the self-driving taxi market

General Motors faces competition in the automated taxi market from Google’s Waymo unit, in partnership with Uber, as well as from taxi services that use regular drivers.
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Earlier this fall, Tesla announced its plans to produce self-driving vehicles without steering wheels, brakes or accelerators as well as a robotaxi service that would allow drivers to rent their own Tesla cars for service.
But General Motors decided it no longer made sense to compete in this segment, and CEO Mary Barra told investors that the company had decided that robo-taxi service was not part of its core business, and that shifting its efforts in self-driving technology to driver-assistance features would… That helps with the products you offer to car buyers.

Criticisms of self-driving taxis

Cruise has also come under fire over the past few years following an October 2023 incident in which her self-driving taxi struck a pedestrian in San Francisco and dragged a woman along the road for 20 feet.
Authorities in California ordered the company to cease operations in the state as a result and GM then suspended service nationwide.
Last month, Cruz agreed to pay a $500,000 fine as part of a deferred prosecution agreement on federal criminal charges of submitting a false record to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration regarding that crash.