General Motors President Mark Reuss is known to most as a longtime GM exec, to many as a true gearhead with a passion for performance, and to me as a truly delightful follow on Twitter/X. Today, Reuss delivered the goods in response to ex-CEO Kyle Vogt critiquing the company.
As background, Kyle Vogt is an engineer and business guy who dropped out of MIT and helped found a bunch of companies, including Twitch, which was later sold to Amazon for almost a billion dollars.
Vogt, a lover of robotics, went on to then start Cruise Automation in order to build driverless cars. The company was sold to GM in 2016 and Dan Ammann, a GM exec, was put in charge, with Vogt being moved to President/CTO. This lasted for a while until Ammann was pushed out by CEO Mary Barra over a disagreement about the future of the company.
AsBloomberg reported at the time:
The two executives didn’t agree on how to focus the breakthrough self-driving technology that the Silicon Valley unit is preparing to launch with a taxi service. Barra and GM’s board were pushing a grand vision that included transferring that knowledge to create luxury Cadillacs, self-driving cars sold at retail or delivery vehicles for GM’s new electric-van business. The opportunities, and their potential value, were immense.
Ammann — a star in his own right who once competed with Barra to run GM — was open to all of those things eventually, but he disagreed on some key points. First, he thought Cruise needed to focus on starting its taxi business before spreading its resources. Second, he wanted Barra and GM’s board to take Cruise public sooner rather than later, giving it stock to lure the rare talent that can program cars to drive themselves, said two people familiar with his thinking.
With Ammann out, Cruise brought back Vogt as CEO and the company pushed forward with its plans to roll out Bolt-based taxis across the world while developing a new driverless vehicle with no steering wheel and campfire seating, which they called the Cruise Origin.
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Then everything went sideways. Last year a Bolt robotaxi in San Francisco ran over a woman who had been struck by a different car and then dragged her about 20 feet to the side of the road. Cruise, according to an internal report, hid some key information from state regulators. This led to Cruise shutting down operations, getting in trouble with the State of California, and eventually to Vogt’s resignation.
While Cruise is back to offering Bolt-based robotaxi service, the company has scrapped the Origin robotaxi for now, with Barra pointing out that doing so will address “the regulatory uncertainty we faced with the Origin because of its unique design.”
Which is to say that the Bolt is a real car that NHTSA will approve and the Origin is still in a legal gray area.
Vogt, now CEO of a new startup called The Bot Company, took to the web to lambast this decision:
Disappointed to see GM kill the Origin. Would have been amazing for cities.
GM repeatedly finds themselves with a 5-10 year head start, but then fumbles the ball, shuts things down, and loses the lead. Anyone remember the EV1?
It’s like someone keeps letting them look into a… pic.twitter.com/GDlL4KQk4S
— Kyle Vogt (@kvogt) July 23, 2024
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Some of this is a fair critique. GM, certainly, loves to come up with great ideas and abandon them too quickly. That’s what it did with the EV1, as Vogt points out, and we’ve certainly written up the company’s other pioneering developments that were fumbled at the last minute.
Buuuuuut, I’m not sure Vogt is right here. He’s obviously a smart and accomplished guy, but there’s no proof yet that these cars would work at scale. And if the third-party report on the dragging incident is to be believed, Cruise under Vogt’s leadership was defined by “inadequate and uncoordinated internal processes, mistakes in judgment, an “us versus them” mentality with government officials, and a fundamental misunderstanding of regulatory requirements and expectations.”
GM was happy to go along with the pie-in-the-sky view of the company so long as it seemed like Cruise could help it achieve more revenue. Now that that bubble has burst, GM is back to doing what GM does so well: Making things that can make money.
The company spent a lot of cash buying into Vogt’s vision and Vogt’s vision, up to this point, hasn’t really worked. Therefore his lecturing of GM after being given billions of dollars is kinda rich, which Reuss demonstrates with extremely succinct, Colin Chapman-like precision:
Nice!
— mreuss ???????? (@GMdudeinNA) July 23, 2024
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Lolololol. Put it in an IV bag and plug it directly into my veins. This is peak sarcasm. While he could have said ‘thanks for sh*tting on us after taking all our money and almost destroying the company you sold us’ he just knocked him down with a single word.
At a time when car executives on social media are either playing it too safe or scaring away customers by being too weird, Reuss has mastered the art of saying a lot by saying a little.
Top image: MLB/YouTube
