GM's Self-Driving Cruise Origin Indefinitely Delayed Amid Major Setbacks

• Cruise has suspended its operations indefinitely after losing its permit to operate a fleet of autonomous Chevy Bolts on public roads.

• The subsidiary of General Motors had hoped to start production of its autonomous Origin vehicle this year, but those plans are now on hold.

• The setback comes after the Bolts were involved in several crashes, among other issues such as blocking emergency vehicles in San Francisco over the past year.

In 2023, it sometimes feels as if we're living in the future. The use of artificial intelligence has exploded with the proliferation of services like ChatGPT (don't worry, this article was written by a real human), Apple launched its Vision Pro mixed-reality headset, and the LED-covered Sphere in Las Vegas is taking entertainment (and advertising) to new heights.

But some aspects of the future are much further away than we thought. Take driverless cars, which some executives—who may or may not be named Elon Musk—have been promising are just around the corner for nearly a decade. Cruise, a subsidiary of General Motors, unveiled its driverless pod, the Origin, in 2020 and claimed production would begin this year. But a series of mishaps for Cruise's fleet of self-driving Chevrolet Bolt EV prototypes have not only prevented the start of Origin production, but have also set back the company's entire operations in a major way.

Cruise started running a fleet of Chevy Bolts fitted with autonomous driving technology and with no-one behind the wheel in 2021, beginning in San Francisco before expanding operations to Phoenix, Miami, Austin, Houston, and Dallas within the past year. But a series of high-profile crashes raised safety concerns, most recently on October 2 when a San Francisco pedestrian who had already been struck by a human-driven car was subsequently hit by a Cruise vehicle. The Cruise car continued driving for a further 20 feet after the collision, dragging the pedestrian with it, and the California Department of Motor Vehicles alleged that Cruise executives misreported the incident. This prompted California officials to indefinitely suspend the company's self-driving car permits on October 24. Cruise then put a pause on its operations, and two founding executives, CEO Kyle Vogt and COO Daniel Kan, resigned last week.

Now a letter sent to employees has revealed Cruise's scaled-back future plans, as reported by Automotive News. Instead of the 13 cities that Cruise had originally aimed to expand to, the company will restart driverless taxi rides in just one city once operations get back underway. The letter didn't specify which metropolis that will be or when Cruise hopes to put vehicles back on the road.