Cruise Automation, GM’s Self-Driving Cars, and the Founders Behind It

This is a great quote: &quot;Startups with no demanding customers can lose their urgency, with development cycles dragging on for years, says Rust, who worked at Google’s experimental research factory before joining Cruise. “We tried to accomplish what one of the most talented teams at Google did in two years and compress that into six months,” Vogt says.&quot;<p>This is one of the main reasons why &quot;internal startups&quot; at big companies fail. They lack urgency. The same thing often happens at startups that are over-funded too -- they think they can afford to take their time and that leads to compounding slowness.

Now that explains some things. The initial Cruise Automation system was lane keeping and auto speed control, which everybody has. It was over-promoted as full automatic driving on the Cruise web site and Youtube.[1] &quot;Just sit back and enjoy the ride&quot;, says the video.<p>The founder was credible enough to sell GM on buying their 40-person startup for somewhere between $500M and $1BN. GM already had the Cadillac&#x2F;CMU technology self-driving technology, which was better than what Cruise had. But GM bought anyway.<p>One of the best deals made since Bill Gates sold IBM on adopting DOS.<p>Meanwhile, Cruise now has multiple Velodyne laser units on a rack on top of the car, like everybody else.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=uEQqQj_zyHI" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=uEQqQj_zyHI</a>

&gt; Cruise is working with GM to add autonomous-driving technology to the Bolt.<p>May be GM popped out $1 billion so that they can put their own of version of Tesla&#x27;s auto pilot in Bolt.

&quot;Statistically speaking, most of us will never build a billion-dollar company. We definitely won’t build two of them&quot;<p>If you mad a billion dollars from your first company then you have a hell of a lot of money to invest in your second, so statistically speaking its actually quite high.

I know I&#x27;ll get downvoted for this, but I&#x27;m virtually positive that Cruise was just snake oil. I expect GM to trail other automakers in this area, particularly after this acquisition. Now, to be fair, that is pretty much the null hypothesis since GM trails in a lot of areas. But, I view the Cruise acquisition as a confirmation of -- not a rebuttal to -- the notion that they are far behind and will fail.

Prepare for downvotes. how dare you criticize the great accomplishments of our new startup heroes?