Last year, Ford announced that it was shutting down Argo AI, a self-driving commercial vehicle company that it had invested heavily in over the past few years. While this decision seemed a bit surprising at first, the automaker’s reasoning for doing so was that it had come to the determination that Level 4 and Level 5 autonomous driving tech isn’t expected to become profitable for a long time, so instead, FoMoCo decided to focus its efforts on Level 2 and Level 3 driver aids. Since then, Ford has created a new company to do just that – Latitude AI – which employs former Argo AI engineers and uses its facilities, to boot. Meanwhile, Ford’s rival General Motors has been working on developing its own autonomous tech via its own separate entity, though Cruise CEO and founder Kyle Vogt recently announced that he was departing the company, according to GM Authority.
This was actually Vogt’s second stint as Cruise CEO, as he took back over the reigns in December 2021 following Dan Amman’s departure. Interestingly, the company will move forward by splitting CEO duties between two individuals – Mo Elshenawy – current Cruise Executive Vice President of Engineering who will assume the title of President and Chief Technology Officer – and Craig Glidden – who is currently GM’s Executive Vice President of Legal and Policy and a Cruise board member, but will now take on the title of President and Chief Technology Officer and Vice Chairman of Cruise’s board.
What makes Vogt’s resignation as Cruise CEO more interesting, however, is that the company has faced its fair share of bad press recently. An autonomous Cruise vehicle trapped and drug a pedestrian down the road this past October after that person was hit by another vehicle, while the company has also been facing an investigation from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and a California DMV driverless permit suspension as a result.
Following all of this, Cruise decided to suspend all of its autonomous rides in as it continues to investigate what went wrong in the aforementioned case, and recently issued a recall designed to update the collision detection system in its robotaxis. “The results from our ongoing review will inform additional next steps as we work to build a better Cruise centered around safety, transparency, and trust,” the company said in a statement.
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It doesn’t take a nuclear scientist to see that this idea is the epitome of stupid. This thing can’t even function in clear weather. Now imagine there’s snow on the ground and some guy needs to get to the airport. He might not even make it but the hospital via ambulance instead because the thing slid into a post or the road salt shorted out the electrical system and the car went buggy putz. Self driving vehicles only work inside of airports or theme parks where they are guided by a rail. Then the same people are pushing for these air taxi’s that are self driven. I’m not a afraid to fly but no way on that.