The General Motors Co’s subsidiary Cruise on Wednesday shared its plans of offering shared rides at completely cheaper rates in a bid to eventually shift their business model beyond the car.
In his blog post headlined “We Need to Move Beyond the Car”, the CEO of autonomous vehicle company wrote that company, rather making incremental growth, would go for order-of-magnitude in improving its transportation business, for which they need explore alternate options that will be better in all aspects of the status quo.
CEO Dan Ammann, who remained president of the largest Detroit automaker previously, said that Cruise is aiming reducing congestions by providing shared rides at radically lower costs to lure customers with an awesome ride experience, and only this would be the way helpful to truly move the company beyond the car to such a transportation system that the company actually deserves.
Though Amman did not unveiled any further details about the Cruise’s plans in his blog post but the company on Wednesday said it would elaborate the roadmap to those plans at a San Francisco event on Jan. 21.
Cruise in a previous announcement said that it joined hands with Honda Motor Co, which is also a minority stakeholder in the company, developing an autonomous vehicle specifically built to be used in ride-sharing.
In an investment round in May this year raising $1.15 billion, Cruise was valued at $19 billion, while its owner GM has a market capitalization of roughly $51.25 billion as on Friday.
The company was previously in plans of starting Cruise robotaxi service by the end of this year, but Amman scrapped that plan earlier in this year.
GM’s rival Alphabet Inc’s Waymo is already operating its ride-sharing services in Arizona in collaboration with Lyft, while Ford compete GM for its ties with Argo AI as development partner for its plans of launching autonomous vehicles to provide delivery and ride-sharing services on commercial basis in the United States which is scheduled to be started in late 2021.
