General Motors is putting the autonomous Cruise Origin shuttle van on ice. The company said that the embattled Cruise, of which GM is the majority owner, will now focus on making the next-gen Chevy Bolt. The automaker discontinued the previous Bolt last year due to a shift away from an older battery system but did not reveal plans for a new model at the time.
According to a letter that GM CEO Mary Barra sent to shareholders, the indefinite delay of the shuttle van “addresses the regulatory uncertainty we faced with the Origin because of its unique design.” Barra added that the per-unit costs of the next-gen Bolt will be much lower, “which will help Cruise optimize its resources.”
GM and Cruise were working on the Origin with Honda. The Origin — which does not have a driver’s seat, steering wheel or pedals — was supposed to debut in Japan in 2026.
In October, the California Department of Motor Vehicles suspended Cruise’s driverless vehicle permits over safety issues. Earlier that month, a pedestrian in San Francisco was dragged 20 feet by a Cruise vehicle and pinned under it after a hit-and-run by another car pushed her into the robotaxi’s path. Cruise later paused all driverless operations before temporarily halting production in November.
According to CNBC, former Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt at one point told staff that hundreds of pre-commercial Origin vehicles had been built. The company has resumed robotaxi operations in Phoenix, Houston and Dallas with human operators on board and is carrying out tests in Dubai. However, it hasn’t recommenced operations in San Francisco. It’s still under investigation for the October incident there.
Shelving the Origin is not a decision that GM and Cruise would have come to lightly. In GM’s second quarter earnings report, the automaker noted that it incurred around $583 million of Cruise restructuring costs. It said these resulted “from Cruise voluntarily pausing its driverless, supervised and manual [autonomous vehicle] operations in the US and the indefinite delay of the Cruise Origin.”
On the plus side, resuming work on the Bolt (which will presumably use GM’s Ultium battery tech the next time around) could be a boon for GM’s bottom line. As of 2023, the Bolt EV and EUV accounted for most of GM’s electric vehicle sales. It planned to make around 70,000 of them last year before ceasing production.
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Source: www.engadget.com