Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

According to news in the morning of September 13, Beijing time, Kyle Vogt, CEO of GM's self-driving technology company Cruise, said on Monday that the company plans to expand its self-driving taxi service to Phoenix, Arizona and Austin, Texas, within 90 days.

Cruise, which is currently losing money, aims to generate $1 billion in revenue by 2025, equivalent to half of GM's annual investment, Vogt said at a Goldman Sachs conference.

In June, Cruise began offering night-time self-driving taxi services in San Francisco using Chevrolet Bolt electric cars. Cruise operates up to 70 driverless cars in San Francisco and plans to double or triple the number by the end of the year, Vogt said.

Mr Vogt said only a small number of self-driving cars would initially be invested in Austin and Phoenix, "generating some revenue" and planned to expand next year.

Cruise has been fully licensed to use self-driving cars to provide ride-hailing and courier services in Phoenix and has partnered with Wal-Mart, one of the investors, to test self-driving delivery services.

Waymo, a self-driving car company owned by Alphabet, already operates a self-driving taxi service in suburban Phoenix. In San Francisco, Waymo also offers self-driving taxi services to a limited number of users, but the cars are equipped with safe drivers.

Some investors are abandoning their investments in high-risk technologies and reassessing the large-scale deployment of self-driving cars on public roads.

The self-driving car industry has shifted from "extremely optimistic" to "extremely pessimistic", but that will change, Mr Vogt said. "I think people will be surprised at the speed with which such services are popularized when they take self-driving cars for the first time."

In June, two people were injured in an accident with Cruise's self-driving car in San Francisco. Subsequently, Cruise recalled 80 self-driving cars and carried out software upgrades. Vogt admitted that "we need to continue to work hard to solve some difficulties", but autopilot technology is no longer a major bottleneck.

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