Driverless car and truck companies have promised to bring us into the future, but so far all many of them have managed to do is crash.
Major businesses in the self-driving vehicle and technology space, including Aurora, TuSimple and Embark Technology, collectively lost $40 billion in value between IPO and October 2022. The sector’s bad fortunes only continued this year.
Autonomous trucking companies have struggled shutdowns, layoffs and stocks down. Driverless car companies have come under intense scrutiny over safety concerns. General Motors’ autonomous vehicle arm, Cruise, has been forced to closing operations entirely, and Tesla has a massive recall of 2 million vehicles due to problems with its automatic driving system.
Quartz compiled a timeline of the failures in the self-driving vehicle world in 2023:
❄️ January 2023
Aurora Innovation, a driverless trucking company, is starting the year at $1.27 per share, down 87% from its IPO stock price. Waymo, a robotaxi company and competitor to Cruise, announce layoffs and pushing back the rollout of its autonomous truck project.
💘 February
California unions hold a rally in Sacramento protesting the possible reversal of a ban on driverless trucks on public roads.
🌼 May
Self-driving truck business Embark Technology be obtained by Applied Intuition for $71 million to lay off 70% of its staff earlier in the year. The company was initially valued at $5 billion in 2021.
🏝️ June
Cruise recalled 80 vehicles after an accident in San Francisco injured two people.
🌞 August
The California Public Utilities Commission give approval for Cruise and Waymo to work all day across San Francisco. Cruise vehicles causing traffic jams the next day. Just a week later, Cruise is forced to cutting its operations in the city in half, after one of his driverless taxis crashed into a fire truck.
🍁 September
Twenty Cruise cars cause a major traffic congestion in Austin, Texas.
🎃 October
A cruise robotaxi hits a pedestrian in San Francisco and drag her 20 feet. The state’s Department of Motor Vehicles bans the company from operating in the city. Meanwhile, Austin, Texas’s transport department reports it has 40 complaints received from residents and first responders about Cruise vehicles, with pedestrians concerned that the cars will hit them. The company suspends its American fleets in Austin and Houston, Texas, as well as Phoenix, Arizona, only as US regulators investigation begins in its operations.
🍗 November
Self-driving technology company Luminar Technologies sees shares slide 15% following lower than expected (pdf) earnings. Cruise co-founders Kyle Vogt and Then Can thank.
⛄️ December
A Washington Post analysis finds so, at least 40 fatal Tesla accidents since 2016, it has involved driver assistance software. Tesla remember almost everyone of its cars in the US about problems with its Autopilot feature. California regulators accuse Cruise of cover up the seriousness of his October accident in San Francisco. The company nine managers fired and fired 24% of his workers.
