🤖🚘 Even as GM retreats, self-driving cars continue to advance

The technology’s uneven progress is a lesson for AI super-optimists

This is the sort of pro-growth, Up Wing analysis that Faster, Please! subscribers crave: A University of Texas study finds autonomous vehicles are poised to transform the automotive industry, with an estimated US economic impact of $1.2 trillion as the supersmart software becomes increasingly central to the value of cars and trucks, as well their operation.

The problem here is that the UT study was published back in 2017, a time when optimistic AV forecasts were hardly uncommon. The most famous of these, probably: Elon Musk in 2019 telling analysts that there would be more than a million self-driving Teslas on the roads by the middle of 2020.

Hey, predictions are hard, especially about the future. And as we enter 2025, the automotive industry hasn’t yet been transformed by self-driving vehicles — and Tesla has yet to launch a self-driving car. Then there’s this: “GM to retreat from robotaxis and stop funding its Cruise autonomous vehicle unit.”

Bloomberg:

In the process, GM will leave the robotaxi business and all the future potential it may hold to Alphabet’s Waymo, Amazon’s Zoox and Tesla. Cruise’s exit leaves the US market to Waymo and Zoox, who already have driverless vehicles on public roads, and whose parents have huge war chests to fund their businesses. Tesla has yet to launch a car capable of running autonomously, and it’s now the only US automaker left devoting serious resources to this pursuit (Ford decided two years ago to cut its losses on driverless startup Argo AI.)

So what’s the current state of the self-driving dream and its outlook for the future?