IMO, it's largely because BlueCruise (and all of the similar services) is not sufficiently better than the non-subscription driver assists.

I have the option of BlueCruise on my vehicle and it's just not a compelling offer.

* It only works on major highways. Beyond actual coverage, major highways are places where the standard driver assists already work extremely well.

* It does nothing about traffic around you. You have to be prepared to react. Not much different than driver assist.

* It's wickedly expensive.

Right now, radar assisted cruise and camera based lane centering eases 95% of my driving fatigue.

That said, when trying to BUY a supercruise vehicle, the sales guys were clueless, I had to review the stat sheets of each car to see which ones did or did not have it. GM is treating this technology as “surveys say 2% of the market wants a self driving vehicle” (incorrect question) compared to “install on every vehicle as an available subscription, let the sales team earn their way.” I’m sure the tech is expensive, but it can’t be that much more at the OEM level.

I also have a Tesla with FSD. FSD is truly amazing but still struggles with edge cases like, my office has two entrances, one is blocked by barrels, it tries to turn into the barrels every time.

Sadly this is believable, I've asked to check out things like remote start and control of heating/cooling, and the sales people cannot show those features off because they require an app + subscription tied to the car.

[1] https://www.templetons.com/brad/robocars/timeline.html

They really don’t know how to develop a compelling product, even though they have an enormous amount of experience and engineering talent.

It’s very similar to the failure of Boeing but GM doesn’t make anything that can kill 200 people at once so we don’t notice.

Global-wise, there are also a few Chinese companies in the robotaxi market. Pony.ai and WeRide both recently went in public market.

BlueCruise vehicles were updated with the most sophisticated driver attention system ive ever seen. It will complain in less time than it takes me to change a radio station.

Before that update, I was enjoying the automated driving a little bit too much, and using it to take liberties with my attention in the car. That was awesome as a user experience.

After the update, I am paying more attention to the road than I did when I was driving a manual. There is no benefit to being able to take my hands off the steering wheel. That’s a good thing for safety, but it means that “level 2.5” driving (or whatever) adds zero marginal utility.

Before the iPhone came out, some pretty decent/popular smartphones existed. I had clients in the industry. They sold a lot of n95s and such.

But... data plans sucked. Apple did an exclusive deal and forced them to include 2gb of data. They could not sell phones with data-less plans. Customers could not buy iphones on data-less plans.

At some point you have to nudge the paradigm.

I've had one Tesla for 6 years, another for 2: I've gotten to a point where I find Autopilot boring and turn it off just for something to do.

My older Tesla has enhanced Autopilot. As impressive as it is, it's very glitchy. I primarily use it so I don't speed.

Because enhanced autopilot was so glitchy, when we added a 2nd Tesla to the household, we didn't pay for FSD. (Enhanced autopilot was too expensive given how glitchy it was in my older car.) The free trials of FSD in the 2nd Tesla are impressive... And glitchy. I constantly need to take over on surface roads; but it is very nice on freeways.

The thing is, "self driving" as a feature just isn't worth the sticker price. If you're sitting in the driver's seat, and there's nothing to do, you can just save yourself a boatload of cash and drive the car yourself. Especially if you have to remain alert at all times, the best way to cut the boredom is to drive the car.

That was a your-dealership issue, not a GM issue. GM doesn't run the dealerships (though they sure have plenty of influence).

I test drove the Silverado EV a month ago and got to try out super cruise.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/18/cars/china-baidu-apollo-go-ro...

It does seem strange but when one considers that the CEO of one of these competitors spent ~$260M to help elect the next President and he will have his ear on matters of autonomous car regulation, maybe not so strange.

If future autonomous car regulations are influenced by Musk and end up being lax and favour the technological approach that Tesla has taken, then GM/Cruise may have made significant irrelevant investments to solve issues that are no longer relevant, and this puts them on poor footing in the new competitive landscape.

It's possible they're bowing out early on the assumption that this will no longer be a competition that they can win.

Yes. I think GM leadership has finally learned enough to realize how far behind they are.

Seems like a) the salesperson might not know his vehicles and perhaps it just wasn't a Super Cruise enabled vehicle (meaning, it wasn't added-on to that specific vehicle). b) the actual Super-Cruise module was broken in that vehicle, and that was his excuse c) he didn't know how or wasn't comfortable with telling you how to enable it. (some people are still quite afraid of giving full control over to computers)

I have tested numerous vehicles with Super Cruise; I quite enjoyed it.

I could be wrong, but unless it's a new GM rule, afaik, and with my understanding of how dealerships work (as far as the ones I've visited), dealerships try to avoid messing with the vehicle programming as much as they can. It's rather sad, as aside from the manufactures, dealerships have the most tools and access to the vehicles programming, but rarely-if-ever stray from the service manual.

Custom programming kind of is a market for that reason.

Living in a state with a very large automotive industry, there are a lot of people who have the tools + knowledge that offer custom programming services like: Programming the key fob that if one was to hold the unlock-door button for 5 seconds, the driver side window opens. And if the lock button is pressed once, then held for 5 seconds, all the windows are rolled up. Enabling a bunch of different video codecs/formats and enabling video-playback while the car is in motion if the passenger seat detects something siting there, etc, etc...

I wonder if this is a liability thing (driver would be responsible).

Or it could suck and the chances of buying the car go down.

I remember walking into an apple store and seeing the apple vision pro headset. I asked to try it, and they said "you can't. You have to make an appointment and blah blah". If someone adds friction to the buying process, there must be some reason - they must be hiding something (poor performance, complexity, price, etc)

GM later had a PR release for UltraCruise which was supposedly developed in house and maybe that uses Cruise technology. However, AFAIK it was never released and is rumored to be shelved.

The facts don't matter anymore.

Just perception.

I think you mean interest in level 3 autonomous driving appears to be cooling across the board

  >Google/Waymo ... Amazon/Zoox ... Uber/Yandex ... GM Super Cruise ... Ford BluesClues

That's the one the press release is referring to, I guarantee it.

I just spit up my drink. Thank you for that.

Waymo isn't scalable.

"It seems like drivers did not find the feature compelling and were not renewing. Interest in autonomous driving appears to be cooling across the board."

No, because BlueCruise sounds like an asinine feature. To make me pay $2450 more for a car for some arbitrary selection roads for that feature to be available doesn't make sense to me.

Cruise really was on to something, well w/e GM's loss!

My pet theory is that it really took off because a bunch of investors were hoping to capture and capitalize on the baby boomers aging out of being able to easily drive themselves. They tried to speed up technological advancements in order to meet that window of a large more-affluent cohort of potential customers.

So it might be interesting to somehow plot total "self driving" investment against that kind of customer base projection over time.

Many others on forums report the same, and here's an example of a component being borked.

AEB, Automatic Emergency Braking, is on by default and always turns back on at vehicle start.

It's dangerous. An example? Even with a camera and a separate radar, it is borked. I've been behind another car, slowing for a light, and hit a downward slope of a large speedbump and SLAM the brakes come on.

Why?

The radar suddenly sees pavement, as the nose of the car is pointed down, but the camera sees car + brake light ahead.

This is at 30km/hr, and everyone is braking fine, the car ahead is not even close. And proof it's not me is the 5 times it happened in 2 weeks, it was always something like this.

I was almost hit 3 times.

It literally panic brakes. Horribly designed.

I finally had it and removed the radar sensor with forscan.

With behaviour like this in something as simple as AEB, by no means would I trust anytiong else. Forums show people complaining about:

* adaptive cruise slowing down, or speeding up because it sees speed limit signs on offramps, or even adjacent roads

* the lane assist pulling strongly because the car thinks an offramp is the main road.

* reports of swerving into other lanes when passing some vehicles, the car confused

It's just junk.

This beta testing on our roads needs to stop.

What cracks me up is this.

If you asked a skilled software dev, if they'd prefer to have software designed by a team, any team, responsible for tgeir life? They'd likely say no.

Because we've all seen the crappy code that gets produced. We know of bugs. We know of failures in testing, automated or not.

These cars ae all extremely buggy, just as any software project is. But beyond that, auto manufacturers are notorious for cutting corners.

I just can't imagine why anyone, this decade, would want to trust auto drive anything.

Fun fact - Cruise did actually have a source code leak a few years back, some engineer decided to embrace the 4 hour work week and outsource their role to a contractor, who uploaded their work to a public github repo (I assume this was accidental and they intended to make a private repo). But it was not core AV code.

It may not be a perfect driving solution (probably 1:1 teleoperator to car in the beginning), but their go to market speed is undeniably better than Waymo et al. Waymo, Cruise, etc have to map out an entire region and have long rollout timelines. In theory Tesla could say they will deploy in X city, talk with the local government to get necessary approvals, and get it going after a few test drives. Thats the tail, anyway. With that kind of go to market speed you can start acquiring customers pretty easily and start scaling up the business. Its basically the typical SaaS setup - cut some corners for market share and become the defacto player in it after some time.

I wouldn't write them out purely out of spite. Their solution is the most conducive to scaling laws, on the ML, operations, and business side.

Baidu/Apollo, maybe. There are deployed robo-taxis in China. Reviews of driving quality indicate "meh", they are sometimes directly teleoperated to get out of problems, and difficult intersections have fixed cameras the cars can see through.

I've been very puzzled at people treating FSD as non-existent when it's very reliably good.

It's very similar to legacy space and internet, the existing players saw SpaceX coming years out, did nothing and got crushed.

Then they didn't deliver.

Waymo hasn't left blood on the pavement. Cruise and Tesla have.

I can't speak to their technology, but generally speaking Cruise seemed too cautious, both in the aggressiveness of the driving, and in how quickly the company capitulated. I've taken Waymo a few times and what stands out to me is how aggressive Waymo cars are. As a passenger this aggressiveness makes them feel more sophisticated, not to mention faster, but the cars also spook pedestrians to a greater extent as they nose their way into traffic or through turns. Nonetheless, Waymo has been more adept at moving past bad publicity than Cruise, including in the face of accidents.

Above and beyond whatever technological shortcomings there may have been[1], I think there was a management and business development mismatch between GM and Cruise. Cruise manifestly worked well enough. With better management--more honest, but also more aggressive--it could have been a contender; heck, it was (is?) the onlyproven competitor to Waymo for autonomous public taxi service, at least in the U.S.

[1] In 3 Waymo trips remote intervention was required once, which is a comparable ratio to my Cruise trips.

For example: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=reTensor

It was well-known and well-leaked that something was wrong with Cruise.

As soon as Cruise closed up shop, the complaints went way down.

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-02-02/safety-nu... (2018)

https://safeautonomy.blogspot.com/2023/10/a-snapshot-of-crui... (2023)

Seems pretty reasonable for difficult new tech.

https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/genie-2-a-large-scale-...

They operated a robo taxi fleet for a time (until they got involved in an accident and mislead the following investigation), what other results would you like to see?

I wouldn't underestimate the advantage of not having to bootstrap a planet scale backend/ML platform. Look how much R&D Uber spends on software and they're not even doing the same level of ML. Waymo can just start using excess capacity across the google fleet whenever it wants for training and simulation. That's a huge advantage.

If Tesla can do level 5 in 2-3 years as you say (and that might be a pretty big “if”), that places them 5+ years behind Waymo.

What leads to the win here, then? Waymo constrained by the cost of LIDAR? Is it truly such a massive % of build cost that they can’t succeed? Is it that Tesla is vertically integrated?

Why not just keep the meter running? Then it ceases to be a problem.

People consuming less energy to get to their destination [2] is good for society

[1] https://engineering.nyu.edu/news/subway-air-pollution-dispro...

[2] https://www.templetons.com/brad/transit-myth.html

I say "we" do - ie, if people want to buy autonomous cars, then that's what's going to happen.

Incidentally if there's a large number of autonomous cars available in a fluid and efficient market, that would probably mean fewer people need cars in total.