Epic article on the relationship between financial dodgy SPACs and autonomous vehicle companies. Explains what SPACs are, and goes into detail on who the AV companies who used them have either already flamed out or will do so relatively soon. No SPAC AV company will be spared.
Article from WSJ on how Waymo will soon be expanding to driverless service on freeways in Phoenix. This is of course key for providing more lucrative airport service. But driving at freeway speeds is of course inherently more dangerous.
Tesla stock price has dropped tremendously so far in 2024. But expect it to drop much further due to inherent problems Tesla is simply failing to address. And this will sure cause FSD to wither away.
Entrepreneur.com reports that Tesla paid no income tax, yet still paid their execs billions. And yet they claim that LiDAR is to expensive for autonomous vehicles.
AAA reports that 91% of surveyed drivers are skeptical overall of fully self-driving vehicles, but are very interested in advanced driver assistance systems such as emergency braking. This indicates that there is not much financial opportunity in robotaxis.
Article from TechCrunch about an Autonomous Vehicle company raising a huge amount of money by jumping on the AI bandwagon. This will surely not end up well.
Article from Fortune on how Tesla is no longer a "red-hot growth stock." This article is pertinent because it shows how Tesla is getting desperate, which of course will affect how they try to further monetize FSD and Auto Pilot, perhaps before they are ready.
In depth article from Bloomberg on the history of the Apple car project. Describes how Apple tried to outdo everyone else and start with Level 5 autonomy. That was one of their many mistakes. Also, interesting that Steve Jobs was apparently first to raise idea of an Apple car. Also, Apple considered buying Tesla at one point, and considered partnering with various automobile companies to actually manufacture the vehicle. But the biggest problem was indecision.
New York Magazine article. Apple canceled their EV/AV program, simply because they could not make it workable. Despite the hype, self-driving is far more complicated than most people thought. A bit of successful self-driving doesn't mean that the fantasy can or should always work.
GM has drastically lowered the value of Cruise by billions and billions of dollars. Cruise valuation dropped roughly from $30 billion to $15 billion. And GM is taking a loss of about $11.6 billion.
Article from SF Examiner on how the City of San Francisco is objecting to Cruise's proposal to the CPUC to end the investigation into the incident where Cruise vehicle hit and dragged a pedestrian.
A truly fascinating and in depth timeline of the ill fated Apple Autonomous/Electric Vehicle program. Amazing that at one point it had 5,000 employees!
After spending billions of dollars, Apple realized that it is best to completely abandon their autonomous electric vehicle program. This article is very relevant because it shows that the current autonomous vehicle business is in collapse. It is an especially important message for Cruise.
It isn’t looking good. It has been 4 months since their epic disaster of seriously injuring a pedestrian, misinforming regulators and the public, and shutting down service. They have pushed out almost all of their executives and a quarter of their staff. And they do not appear to have a recovery plan. Things do not look good. One has to expect Cruise to be sold in a fire sale or simply abandoned by the end of 2024. This post covers a few recent factors that point in this direction.
This article is only of interest because it shows how drastically robotaxi plans have changed over the last few years. Waymo purchased from Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (now Stellantis) 100 minivans in 2016 and then another 500 in 2017. In January 2018 it was announced that Waymo was ordering "thousands" of minivans for a 2018 self-driving fleet rollout. In August 2018 it was announced that Stellantis was going to supply (up to) 62,000 minivans to Waymo/Google. But that is all just a distant memory.
