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General Motors CEO Mary Barra still believes an autonomous vehicle with no steering wheel and pedals is “definitely” in her company’s future, despite recently cancelling the purpose-built Origin.
Barra told the crowd at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 on Tuesday that she still has an eye on a purpose-built robotaxi, but that she made the call to kill the Origin after an exhausting, years-long attempt to change the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS).
“I’ve probably been working on it for six, seven years now,” Barra said on stage. “There came a point earlier this year where we said: ‘How much harder can we go when we don’t have the legislative change?’ And then if you look at how hard it is to get a new law passed right now, we decided that we had to make the right decision.”
That decision came earlier this year in July, after months of controversy at GM’s self-driving subsidiary Cruise. GM took a $583 million charge when it canceled the Origin project. The company had once projected it would make Origins “in the tens of thousands.”
Barra also said on the Disrupt stage that she “absolutely” still believes people will one day buy their own personal autonomous vehicles. “We’re going to see how it unfolds and how consumers leverage the technology,” she said.
But she admitted that the rise of autonomous vehicle technology has taken longer than she imagined. “I think we all thought in that 2016, 2017 time frame it was going to go much more quickly,” she said.
Sean O’Kane is a reporter who has spent a decade covering the rapidly-evolving business and technology of the transportation industry, including Tesla and the many startups chasing Elon Musk. Most recently, he was a reporter at Bloomberg News where he helped break stories about some of the most notorious EV SPAC flops. He previously worked at The Verge, where he also covered consumer technology, hosted many short- and long-form videos, performed product and editorial photography, and once nearly passed out in a Red Bull Air Race plane.
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