Welcome back to the latest episode of The Future of Automotive on CBT News, where we put recent automotive and mobility news into the context of the broader themes impacting the industry.
I’m Steve Greenfield from Automotive Ventures, and I’m glad that you could join us.
Fifteen years ago, many industry experts believed in a bold, fully-autonomous future. One that by now would have driven the cost per mile of Ridehailing down so far as to convince all of us to no longer own vehicles ourselves. This dystopian future would have meant no more new car sales to consumers; very few consumers owning cars in their driveways, and transportation would have been redefined by ubiquitous, driverless robotaxis circulating around city streets.
The implications of this future would have been manyfold. If consumers no longer owned vehicles, what would that have meant for automakers and their dealers? Who was going to own these large fleets of autonomous robotaxis? Where would these cars park at night to get cleaned, recharged and recalibrated?
It does beg a number of questions. If all cars are fully autonomous, are there any more accidents? If there aren’t any more accidents, what happens to the collision repair industry? In the case of an autonomous vehicle, is the insurance company insuring the passenger, the car or the software company? And will health insurance premiums come down if we successfully eliminated crashes and the associated 40k+ traffic related deaths per year? And what about the owners of all of those parking lots that may no longer needed?
Given the far and wide implications of a fully autonomous future, maybe we’re better off that the industry experts were wrong about how quickly we’d get there.
Having said that, it does distinctively feel like we may finally be on the cusp of dramatic adoption of fully-autonomous vehicles on our streets. Just look around many major U.S. cities as Waymos comprise a growing number of vehicles in operation. And initial feedback is that consumer actually like hailing a Waymo vs. sitting in an Uber or taxi with a human driver.
Given all of this context, maybe it’s not surprising that we have news this week that General Motors is reconsidering their decision to shutter their fully autonomous division Cruise.
Eighteen months after killing off Cruise, its independent robotaxi subsidiary, General Motors has hired back more than 100 members of the unit’s former team, including senior managers who have moved back into their old roles.
The hiring spree, which also includes employees poached from Nvidia, Uber and Zoox, reflects GM’s decision to develop fully autonomous vehicles for consumers’ personal use. GM continues to maintain that they are not getting back into the driverless ride-hailing business. That, of course, was Cruise’s original focus.
The first product from the reconstituted group will be an electric Cadillac in which the driver would be able to operate the car on highways while not watching the road or touching the wheel.
GM plans to release it in 2028, with more models to follow. Later, the cars will have eyes-off autonomous capability in urban areas as well. Eventually, the “driver” will not have to sit in the driver’s seat at all.
GM’s partial reconstitution of its Cruise staff—the company let go some 1,000 Cruise employees after disbanding the unit—reflects a broad auto industry consensus that consumers will soon begin to expect and demand hands-off and later eyes-off autonomous capability in their cars. In China last month, consumers are already beginning to expect advanced autonomous features in any new car they inspected for purchase.
That will soon be the case in the U.S., too. Tesla is forecasting progress for their Full Self Driving software in the next couple of years to be capable of operating without oversight by a driver, and that major automakers will have to follow.
If consumers are exposed to the technology in Waymos, and start to see it in Teslas, they may very well expect similar technologies in the cars they buy from brands like Ford, Toyota and GM.
GM’s embrace of personal autonomous vehicles also reflects somewhat of a shift in industry thinking from a decade ago, when the company bought Cruise for $1.1 billion based on the belief that the autonomous future was driverless ride-hailing businesses, popularly known as robotaxis.
Cruise was neck and neck with Waymo in a race to commercialize robotaxis, and GM CEO Mary Barra said she expected Cruise to deliver $50 billion in revenue annually by 2030. In 2024, however, just ahead of planned trials to operate its cars without a safety driver, Barra said she had reconsidered robotaxis, deciding they would be too costly to scale up and operate.
Waymo, Tesla and many investors continue to predict a future of massive use of robotaxis. In February, Waymo raised $16 billion in a Series C round at a $126 billion valuation, double its last round in October 2024. Tesla CEO Elon Musk has repeatedly predicted that his company will eventually sell up to 4 million robotaxis, which it calls the Cybercab, per year.
It’s possible of course that the two models—Ridehailing robotaxis alongside autonomous cars for personal use— will co-exist. In fact, Tesla seems to plan to offer both models, offering the owners of its cars to enroll in Tesla’s robotaxi network alongside the Cybercab in the future.
Automakers also find the business model attractive because of the possibility of profits from selling recurring subscriptions for autonomy as a service.
The next few years will prove out a few things around autonomous vehicles: whether this is technology that will be primarily embraced for Ridehailing, or whether we’re all going to own fully autonomous cars in our driveway; what the impact will be on new and used vehicle sales if the average consumer starts to substitute some of their miles driven for cheaper fully autonomous vehicles, and what the downstream impact is going to be on vehicle insurance, traffic deaths, health insurance and the collision repair industry.
In any event, it does distinctively feel like the autonomous vehicle future that we were promised a decade ago may have finally arrived.
So, with that, let’s transition to Our Companies to Watch.
Every week we highlight interesting companies in the automotive technology space to keep an eye on. If you read my weekly Intel Report, we showcase a company to watch, and take the opportunity here on this segment each week to share that company with you.
Today, our new company to watch is LoanBridge.
Loanbridge delivers vehicle event intelligence that helps teams act faster and waste less time.
Near-real-time alerts surface impounds, tows, theft, and resale activity from a unique nationwide data mix.
Then Voice AI can verify the details automatically—so your team moves from signal to action with less friction.
Here’s what Loanbridge looks like in the real world: millions of VINs monitored, hundreds of thousands of confirmed event matches, real collateral value located, and thousands of hours saved through automation.
If you’d like to learn more about LoanBridge, you can check them out at: www.LoanBridge.ai
So that’s it for this week’s Future of Automotive segment.
If you’re an AutoTech entrepreneur working on a solution that helps car dealerships, we want to hear from you. We are actively investing out of our new Mobility Fund.
Don’t forget to check out my two books, The Future of Automotive Retail and The Future of Mobility, both available on Amazon.com.
Thanks (as always) for your ongoing support and for tuning into CBT News for this week’s Future of Automotive segment. We’ll see you next week!
