Ark Invest analyst Tasha Keeney on Tuesday noted that General Motors Co‘s GM autonomous driving unit Cruise took way more risks than its competitors like Alphabet Inc’s GOOG GOOGL Waymo or Tesla Inc’s TSLA full self-driving (FSD), despite the current pause in its operations amid safety concerns.
What Happened: As per an infographic shared by Keeney on X, the national average for adjusted million miles per crash on surface streets in 2021 was 0.19 million. Tesla in full self-driving in 2023 traveled 3.2 million miles before being involved in a crash while Waymo traveled 0.5 million miles. Cruise, however, traveled merely 0.04 million miles before a crash.
“Waymo still looks better than the average human, while Cruise falls below,” Keeney noted. However, Cruise, for its end, claims that most of their collisions were at low speeds and that human drivers were mostly at fault.
However, despite its setbacks, Cruise together with Waymo paved the way for regulatory approval for autonomous cars, the analyst noted.
“It’s possible that could benefit a large, looming competitor,” she wrote, possibly referring to Tesla.
Musk Reacts: In her analysis, Keeney also wrote, “Tesla’s FSD software (which isn’t fully driver-out yet) appears to be much better than its human-driven Tesla benchmark.”
Tesla CEO Elon Musk responded to the analysis and reiterated the safety of its supervised FSD over human driving. “Unsupervised FSD is trending well. Over time, Version 12 (end-to-end neural nets) will far exceed human safety even when unsupervised,” Musk wrote.
Early in July, at the 2023 World Artificial Intelligence Conference, Musk said that Tesla is "very close" to achieving full self-driving capability, meaning the vehicles will be entirely autonomous with no need for supervision.
What Is Up With Cruise: Cruise has currently paused both autonomous and manual AV operations in the United States after being embroiled in safety concerns.
While autonomous operations started to be suspended in October, manual autonomous vehicle operations were suspended earlier this month in a bid to rebuild public trust and undergo a full safety review.
However, Cruise said on Wednesday that it is currently looking to relaunch in one city and expand from there after proving its performance.
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