Uber partners with GM’s Cruise to offer self-driving ride service

General Motors’ self-driving car subsidiary Cruise is partnering with ride-hailing company Uber Technologies Inc. in a multiyear deal, the companies announced Thursday.
The companies did not offer any financial details of the arrangement, but they said they plan to launch the partnership next year with a dedicated number of Chevrolet Bolt-based autonomous vehicles.
Once the service is launched, when an Uber rider requests a qualifying ride on the Uber app, they may be given the option of choosing a self-driving Cruise vehicle.
“Cruise is on a mission to leverage driverless technology to create safer streets and redefine urban life,” Marc Whitten, CEO of Cruise, said in a statement. “We are excited to partner with Uber to bring the benefits of safe, reliable, autonomous driving to even more people, unlocking a new era of urban mobility.”
Uber’s CEO said the company is thrilled with the partnership.
“As the largest mobility and delivery platform, we believe Uber can play an important role in helping to safely and reliably introduce autonomous technology to consumers and cities around the world,” Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, said in a statement.
Uber once intended to develop its own self-driving cars and partnered with Volvo in 2016. That ended when a self-driving Uber vehicle hit and killed a woman in 2018 as she was walking her bicycle across a road in Tempe, Arizona. The Uber safety driver on board at the time, Rafaela Vasquez, was ultimately found legally liable for the incident, according to Wired.
Uber has partnered with Waymo, owned by Google, to offer driverless rides or food delivery to Uber users via robotaxis in Arizona.
This new partnership with Uber is not the first time GM has partnered with a ride-hailing company. In 2016, GM invested $500 million in Lyft with plans to eventually develop a fleet of self-driving cars that could be hailed using Lyft’s mobile app. But by 2018, GM had decided to instead launch its own vehicles and network through Cruise.
Cruise spokeswoman Tiffany Testo said Cruise remains focused on “relaunching our own driverless app and service. The launch of this partnership will follow that and will be separate from the rides offered on their platform.”
Since this spring, Cruise, which was founded in 2013, has been inching closer to restarting its driverless robo-taxi business after halting all services and recalling its vehicles late last year. As of June, Cruise resumed manual driving in Phoenix, Houston and Dallas. Supervised driving is underway in Phoenix and Dallas, according to a company blog post.
During its second-quarter earnings in July, GM CEO Mary Barra said GM is suspending production of the Cruise Origin, a self-driving buslike vehicle that does not have a steering wheel or pedals. It had been assembled at Factory Zero in Detroit and Hamtramck, MICHIGAN, for use in a Cruise robo-taxi fleet.
Barra said Cruise will focus “their next autonomous vehicle on the next-generation Chevrolet Bolt, instead of the Origin. This addresses the regulatory uncertainty we faced with the Origin because of its unique design. In addition, per-unit costs will be much lower, which will help Cruise optimize its resources.”
More:GM’s Cruise recalls nearly 1,200 robotaxis to close US investigation
Cruise stopped all operations last fall after an incident in October in San Francisco, where the company is headquartered. A human-driven vehicle hit a pedestrian, pushing her into an oncoming Cruise self-driving car, which then dragged her several feet, leaving the woman critically injured. Cruise had been using modified Chevrolet Bolts at the time.
The fallout from that Oct. 2 accident resulted in regulators suspending Cruise from further operations in San Francisco. That was followed by Cruise opting to suspend all its operations nationwide. Cruise was accused of misleading federal regulators about the incident too. Ultimately, Cruise fired nine executives and cut about 24% of its full-time employees, about 900 people. Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt and co-founder and Chief Product Officer Dan Kan resigned.
As the Detroit Free Press, part of the USA TODAY Network, has reported, GM has invested about $8 billion in Cruise since 2016. Cruise leaders had at one point promised to deliver $1 billion in annual revenue by 2025, but the subsidiary has not made any money. In April, Barra reiterated to Wall Street that relaunching Cruise safely, “while delivering strong margins and cash flows,” is a top priority for GM this year. 
GM has never wavered in its support of the company’s mission, and earlier this year GM CFO Paul Jacobson said the company expects to spend $1.7 billion on Cruise operations this year, down slightly from GM’s spend on Cruise in previous years of around $2 billion a year.
Contact Jamie L. LaReau: [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter @jlareauan.