Kyle Vogt, the CEO of Cruise, said that the company will launch its taxi service in Phoenix and Austin before the end of the century. If everything goes to plan, the company will expand quickly in 2023. According to audio published by Seeking Alpha, the CEO said at the conference that the question is no longer whether the tech works, but if it works next. In the next 90 days, Cruise will be available in two more markets, Phoenix and Austin. It will initially be small scale, but will be able to generate revenue with scaled operations in the future.
During late night hours in San Francisco, Cruise uses a Chevy Volt-based vehicle called the CruiseAV. The first Cruise Origin vehicles, seen above, will be rolling off the line in 2023.
The design of Origin looked like something out of Westworld and there have been plenty of regulatory hurdles along the way. The permits for Cruise to operate in San Francisco took 33 months, but the permits for Austin and Phoenix took just 3 weeks.
Consumers have been waiting on robot taxis for over 100 years. They were often thought of as something that Americans would own themselves. There are many hurdles that have to be overcome in order for that to happen. The focus at the beginning of the 2010s shifted to more of a taxi-hailing model, with many people predicting that no one in a given city would actually own a car.
Some of the reasons consumers enjoy self-drive taxis are more than sitting in a car with a human driver.
There is no more fear about getting in a car with a stranger. You don't have to listen to your driver's personal conversations or listen to their music anymore. You don't have to worry about whether your driver is alert or if they're looking at their phone or sleeping.
Where does he think the company will go in the future? According to the CEO, Cruise will hit $1 billion of revenue in the next ten years.
The question is how quickly can we build AVs. That is the number one thing that affects revenue. More audiovisuals, more revenue potential is what it is. You can't make money if you don't have audiovisual equipment. That is something GM knows how to do.
The CEO said that he believes Cruise is way ahead of its competitors because of its partnership with General GM.
It's like a cheat code in a video game. Ten years is a long time. It's difficult for other companies to figure out how to build an electric vehicle reliably and at scale. There is a partner in GM who can do it.
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