General Motors may have shut down its dedicated robotaxi division, but it hasn’t bowed out of the race.
Sterling Anderson, the former head of Tesla’s Autopilot program and GM’s chief product officer, told Business Insider in an interview that the company’s focus on autonomy in personal cars could be applied to driverless ride-hailing services in the future.
Anderson said GM’s approach is to develop self-driving technology by breaking the driving experience into pieces and examining where autonomy is most useful to car owners. That means first tackling long stretches of highway driving before expanding to arterial roads and urban centers.
Over time, the executive said GM’s autonomous driving systems will be able to operate in enough regions to make a viable robotaxi service.
“Ultimately, the two converge. Our operating region looks identical to the operating region of a robotaxi company,” he said. “The question at that point becomes, ‘Why not offer them in a robotaxi-type application as well?'”
GM was once seen as one of the leading challengers to Alphabet’s Waymo robotaxis, pouring more than $10 billion into Cruise, the robotaxi startup that it acquired in 2016. The division was shut down in 2024 after facing regulatory hurdles and a safety incident that forced Cruise to pause testing in California.
GM has since shifted its focus toward its hands-off, eyes-on driver assistance tech called Super Cruise, akin to Tesla Full Self-Driving. The company said in April that GM customers have driven one billion hands-free miles with the feature and that it plans to introduce eyes-off highway driving in 2028.
The shift has come with a rebuilding of GM’s autonomous-driving ranks. Business Insider reported in December that it had hired Ronalee Mann, a former Cruise and Tesla executive, for its renewed self-driving focus inside the company. The Information reported last week that GM has rehired about 100 former Cruise employees to develop eyes-off driving capabilities.
Several other legacy automakers and EV startups are charting their own path to robotaxis. Hyundai-backed Motional launched a robotaxi service with Uber in Las Vegas this year and plans to commercialize fully driverless rides there by the end of 2026. Rivian is also developing autonomous driving for a future robotaxi fleet. The EV maker announced a $1.25 billion robotaxi deal with Uber in March.
While GM isn’t jumping headfirst into a robotaxi play, Anderson said the company will be prepared to meet the demand.
“We’ll be ready for it,” he said. “If that’s where the world goes, our autonomous vehicles will be capable of being robotaxis as well.”
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