[cheeselip420]

Cruise is leveraging human-in-the-loop to expand faster than they otherwise would, with the hope that they will solve autonomy later to bring this down.

I don't think this is a viable strategy though given the enormous costs and challenges involved.

There doesn't exist a short-term timeline where Cruise makes money, and the window is rapidly closing. They needed to expand to show big revenues, even if they had to throw 1.5 bodies per car at the problem.

Prediction: GM will offload cruise, a buyer will replace leadership and layoff 40% of the company. The tech may live to see another day, but given the challenges that GM has generally (strikes, EVs, etc), they can no longer endlessly subsidize Cruise.

[Retric]

Human in the loop can be vastly cheaper than you might think.

If this lets them have the only level 5 system on the market they could double that and millions would happily pay. Suppose your a trucking company would you rather pay 50k / year or 5k/year? That’s a stupidly easy choice.

Americans drive roughly 500 hours per year. If they can replace 98% with automation and the other 2% with someone making 20$/hour that only costs them ~200$/year, which then drops as the system improves.

[cheeselip420]

Human in the loop is fine.

Negative unit economics and massive expansion are not.

[chaostheory]

GM actually spun off Cruise in 2018. Honda now has shares in Cruise. SoftBank used to own some as well, but GM bought out their share last year

[cheeselip420]

GM had FOMO and now it's time for FAFO.

[jakobson14]

you don't need autonomy to be profitable.

Imagine a car rental service where someone in an office building drives the empty car to you, then drives it back when you're done with it. No taking public transportation just to get back to the garage to pick up the next drop-off. Imagine simply swapping the driver controlling a ling haul truck remotely when it's time for a shift change. With good handoff the truck can be driving 24/7 without ever slowing down.

Really the only autonomy you need in that situation is enough to pull the truck/car/whatever over and park it if the connection is lost.

[dontblink]

So Waymo/Google winning here in your opinion?

[cheeselip420]

Waymo will have challenges scaling rapidly, but they may be able to get some sort of favorable unit economics and expand more slowly.

Tesla has the scale and for some reason regulators give them a pass. I wouldn't bet against Elon, but we aren't there yet...