A few weeks ago, the news broke out that the Company Argo AI , which belongs to Ford and Volkswagen, has ceased its autonomous car activity, despite being already operating in several US cities such as Miami and Austin
Every day there are more experts who still see far away the day when cars are truly autonomous, and opt for certain autonomous capabilities in certain very specific situations in large cities, to offer driverless taxi services.
Around the same time it has been known that the Cruise company (belongs to General Motors) may lose more than 1 billion dollars this year, and it is unknown when it will make profits, although its directors announce them for the year 2025. I suppose that to win time in the meantime.
I have not obtained current economic data from Waymo, and the last thing I know is that in 2021 they injected 2,500 million dollars. This company also performs driverless taxi services in several cities in the USA, it is the oldest in the market and the one with the best autonomous driving technology.
The problem is that the autonomous taxi service has a lower price than that of taxis with driver, and both the costs of the investments made, as well as the cost of the control and management system do not seem to support such low prices that they offer. And therefore the losses appear.
Ford has spent almost 3 billion dollars on Argo, and Volkswagen will have done something similar, and I guess they have run out of patience. No matter how big the companies are, and these are, they all control their expenses in the short, medium and long term. And the positive economic results of autonomous taxis are still far in the future.
There are still quite a few companies working on autonomous cars and trucks, and I expect we will see more changes in the future.
The large automotive companies know that they need huge investments to remain at the forefront of the electric car, and I am very clear that for them this is a priority over autonomous driving.
And today that is the most urgent issue. They are going to dedicate most of their economic resources to this, because that is where their future will lie.
Waymo in the US and Baidu in China are different. They belong to two huge technological groups not related to the automotive industry, they have large financial means, and they want to be leaders in autonomous driving.
Offering autonomous taxi services, or perhaps in the future outsourcing some of its software to automotive companies to apply it to their vehicles.
That future is yet to be defined.
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