• General Motors spent $10B on its Cruise robotaxi business before shutting it down in 2024.
• GM is now focusing on autonomy in personally-owned cars.
• The company's chief product officer said that technology will converge toward robotaxis.

General Motors may have shut down its dedicated robotaxi division, but it hasn't bowed out of the race.

Sterling Anderson, the former head of Tesla's Autopilot program and GM's chief product officer, told Business Insider in an interview that the company's focus on autonomy in personal cars could be applied to driverless ride-hailing services in the future.

Anderson said GM's approach is to develop self-driving technology by breaking the driving experience into pieces and examining where autonomy is most useful to car owners. That means first tackling long stretches of highway driving before expanding to arterial roads and urban centers.

Over time, the executive said GM's autonomous driving systems will be able to operate in enough regions to make a viable robotaxi service.

"Ultimately, the two converge. Our operating region looks identical to the operating region of a robotaxi company," he said. "The question at that point becomes, 'Why not offer them in a robotaxi-type application as well?'"

GM was once seen as one of the leading challengers to Alphabet's Waymo robotaxis, pouring more than $10 billion into Cruise, the robotaxi startup that it acquired in 2016. The division was shut down in 2024 after facing regulatory hurdles and a safety incident that forced Cruise to pause testing in California.

GM has since shifted its focus toward its hands-off, eyes-on driver assistance tech called Super Cruise, akin to Tesla Full Self-Driving. The company said in April that GM customers have driven one billion hands-free miles with the feature and that it plans to introduce eyes-off highway driving in 2028.

The shift has come with a rebuilding of GM's autonomous-driving ranks. Business Insider reported in December that it had hired Ronalee Mann, a former Cruise and Tesla executive, for its renewed self-driving focus inside the company. The Information reported last week that GM has rehired about 100 former Cruise employees to develop eyes-off driving capabilities.

Several other legacy automakers and EV startups are charting their own path to robotaxis. Hyundai-backed Motional launched a robotaxi service with Uber in Las Vegas this year and plans to commercialize fully driverless rides there by the end of 2026. Rivian is also developing autonomous driving for a future robotaxi fleet. The EV maker announced a $1.25 billion robotaxi deal with Uber in March.

While GM isn't jumping headfirst into a robotaxi play, Anderson said the company will be prepared to meet the demand.

"We'll be ready for it," he said. "If that's where the world goes, our autonomous vehicles will be capable of being robotaxis as well."

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• Uber has partnered with at least a dozen robotaxi players in the past few years.
• The ride-hailing giant is spreading its bets in an industry that still has no clear winner.
• The investments also stimulate a robotaxi economy that's not ruled by a singular player.

By Dara Khosrowshahi's telling, the robotaxi future doesn't belong to one company: Multiple vendors supply the fleet as driverless cars expand the market, and in the middle of it all, Uber stands as the demand gatekeeper.

The ride-hailing giant's latest deal blitz seems designed to ensure this is the future that materializes.

Uber announced three new robotaxi partnerships in the past few weeks with Zoox, Wayve-Nissan, and Rivian. In less than half a decade, the company has secured at least a dozen deals, including with WeRide, AVride, May Mobility, Momenta, Pony.AI, Wayve, Baidu's Apollo Go, Motional, and Lucid-Nuro.

Still, less than a half-dozen of Uber's partners have deployed fully driverless, paid robotaxi operations, and only one, Waymo, operates in the US. Uber has a joint deployment with Waymo in Atlanta, Austin, and Phoenix, but in other cities, Waymo is a competitor.

Uber's partnership spree is less about seeking the singular, dominant player of autonomous driving. Instead, analysts told Business Insider that Uber is ensuring multiple vendors can participate in the expensive business of robotaxis — fending off the real risk of a Waymo or Tesla scaling on its own — and giving itself a stake in the robotaxi economy by being the aggregator of choice.

"The more diversified the supplier base, the better for the network in the middle, which is Uber," Mark Mahaney, an Uber analyst for Evercore ISI, told Business Insider.

Uber's defense and offense

Uber abandoned its in-house self-driving division years ago. Today, the ride-hailing company is targeting partnerships, including companies that, unlike Waymo, have expressed no interest in making their own apps, such as Nuro and Hyundai's Motional.

Instead, it is going the partnership route to shape a multiplayer market with companies that have expressed no interest in developing their own apps, including Nuro and Hyundai's Motional.

Those partnerships are not just about hedging, said Lloyd Walmsley, an Uber analyst for Mizuho Financial Group. By joining the investor roster, a giant like Uber puts its stamp of approval on those companies, thus attracting other investors that can help fund a smaller outfit, he said.

"The bets they're making aren't that big relative to their market cap," Walmsley said of Uber. "So it's in their interest to put a little bit of capital out there that then attracts even more capital from third parties that will build the ecosystem for them."

Laura Major, the CEO of Motional, framed the stakes more bluntly. She told Business Insider that autonomy — and having multiple players — is "existential" for Uber.

"If there's one winner, that's going to be a problem for them," Major said. "I think it creates a huge risk if that robotaxi partner starts their own ride-hail service."

Uber's strategy, through that lens, is defensive. Waymo has shown it can offer commercial robotaxis with its own app and fleet maintenance, and Tesla remains a looming threat as it works on Robotaxi. If one or both companies can control the car, the software, and the customer relationship at scale, Uber's position weakens.

However, Uber's bets are also opportunistic. Walmsley said that if Uber can add more autonomous options that bring down the cost of human-driven rides, the company can increase demand, not just cannibalize the volume of trips that exist today.

Mahaney agreed that Uber's strategy can expand the total addressable market — in this case, the total pool of ride bookings Uber could eventually capture. He added that a larger group of partners could also help Uber secure more favorable deal terms.

One or two players could "probably extract pretty aggressive terms from Uber," Mahaney said. "If there are five to 10, then actually Uber gets more negotiating leverage."

Who will stay in the robotaxi race?

The gap between signing a partnership and putting thousands of safe, fully driverless cars on the road remains wide. Most of Uber's partners have yet to deploy a fully driverless, paid service.

Motional believes cost could be the decisive factor. Alan Hall, Motional's director of communications, said flashy demos and features will matter less than who can scale the cheapest and safest ride.

Mahaney, the Evercore ISI analyst, similarly said that having a few cars in one city proves far less than having a company that can sustain a large commercial fleet. Until then, Uber is placing bets on a field that still has no clear shape, he said.

"There are a lot of players out there," Major, the Motional CEO, said. "No one knows quite who's going to survive this phase."

An Uber spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.