General Motors has announced it’s cutting funding for its Cruise driverless taxi subsidiary.

It says it plans to realign its autonomous driving strategy and prioritise development of advanced driver assistance systems on a path to fully autonomous personal vehicles.

In a statement the company said GM will “build on the progress of Super Cruise”, which is the company’s hands-off, eyes-on driving feature, now offered on more than 20 GM vehicle models and currently logging over 10 million miles per month.

GM intends to combine the majority-owned Cruise LLC and GM technical teams into a single effort to advance autonomous and assisted driving. Consistent with GM’s capital allocation priorities, GM will no longer fund Cruise’s robotaxi development work given the considerable time and resources that would be needed to scale the business, along with an increasingly competitive robotaxi market.

“GM is committed to delivering the best driving experiences to our customers in a disciplined and capital efficient manner,” said Mary Barra, chair and CEO of GM. “Cruise has been an early innovator in autonomy, and the deeper integration of our teams, paired with GM’s strong brands, scale, and manufacturing strength, will help advance our vision for the future of transportation.”

“As the largest U.S. automotive manufacturer, we’re fully committed to autonomous driving and excited to bring GM customers its benefits – things like enhanced safety, improved traffic flow, increased accessibility, and reduced driver stress,” said Dave Richardson, senior vice president of software and services engineering.

GM, which owns about 90% of Cruise, has agreements with other shareholders that will raise its ownership to more than 97%. The company will pursue the acquisition of the remaining shares. Contingent upon the repurchase of these shares and Cruise board approval, GM will work with the Cruise leadership team to restructure and refocus Cruise’s operations.

(Picture – Cruise)