General Motors Co. bought out the SoftBank Vision Fund 1's stake in self-driving startup Cruise LLC for $2.1 billion, ending the Japanese investment firm's involvement in the business and giving the Detroit automaker 80% ownership. GM also said Friday it will invest another $1.35 billion in Cruise, which makes up for the amount that SoftBank had pledged to invest in the startup once the company deploys vehicles in a ride-sharing business, something it is preparing to do. The deal consolidates GM's ownership and control over Cruise, and reverses a capital diversification play by former Chief Executive Officer Dan Ammann, who was fired in December after pushing for an initial public offering. GM CEO Mary Barra and Cruise founder Kyle Vogt, who replaced Ammann as CEO, have said an IPO isn't in the offing at this time and likely won't be anytime soon. "Why not just go public? It's a major distraction, especially right now," Vogt said on Twitter after GM announced the deal.

General Motors is going to sell fully autonomous vehicles to regular people by the middle of the decade, the company's CEO Mary Barra declared during her speech at the 2022 Consumer Electronics Show. It was a bold claim that is sure to cause waves in the auto industry, especially as it continues to grapple with its own over-inflated expectations about the future of driverless cars. Barra didn't offer further details about the kind of vehicle it will sell, which markets it will target, how it will address liability in the event of a crash, and most importantly, whether owners will be able to sleep in their autonomous vehicles. To date, there are no self-driving cars for sale to consumers as personally owned vehicles. Autonomous vehicles, which are outfitted with multiple sensors and high-powered computer systems, are very expensive to develop.

General Motors announced Thursday that Dan Ammann, CEO of its self-driving vehicle division, Cruise, is leaving both his position and the company. Details are remain scarce on the reason for Ammann's sudden departure, though the company has already named Cruise President and CTO Kyle Vogt the interim CEO. What's more, former Northrop Grumman CEO, Wesley Bush, will be joining the Cruise Board of Directors as well. "GM will accelerate the strategy the company detailed in its recent Investor Day, in which Cruise will play an integral role in building GM's autonomous vehicle (AV) platform as GM aggressively pursues addressable AV markets beyond rideshare and delivery," GM PR wrote in Thursday's staffing announcement. The move comes weeks after the company earned DMV approval to offer autonomous rides to the California public in October and the launch of its driverless taxi service this November.

"So that's a step or two beyond what we'll be doing initially with this permit," said Dan Ammann, Cruise's chief executive. "It's not too far down the road," he said, but declined to share a timeline. In a blog post, he added, "We're not the first company to receive this permit, but we're going to be the first to put it to use on the streets of a major U.S. city." It will be an important step for Cruise to charge customers. For any of the companies to start making money in California, a separate permit is required, state officials said.

Self-driving cars will start rolling on the streets of San Francisco without a human on board by the end of this year, according to Cruise, a General Motors-owned autonomous vehicle company that received a permit from the California Department of Motor Vehicles this week. Cruise is now one of five companies to hold a permit to test self-driving cars in California without a person in the vehicle, along with the Alphabet-owned Waymo and several others, though dozens of companies have been permitted by the California DMV to test self-driving cars with a human operator in the vehicle. GM President Dan Ammann confirmed in blog post on Thursday that the company will rapidly deploy its autonomous vehicles in San Francisco by the end of this year, citing the potential safety and environmental benefits the technology could have for city residents. "And while it would be easier to do this in the suburbs, where driving is 30–40 times less complex, our cities are ground zero for the world's transportation crisis," Ammann wrote. "This is where accidents, pollution, congestion, and lack of accessibility collide.

Last week, Waymo, the self-driving vehicle developer owned by Alphabet, expanded a first-of-its-kind service offering rides to paying passengers around Phoenix--with no one behind the wheel. Videos shared by Waymo and others show its minivans navigating wide, sunny streets with ease. Now rival Cruise, a General Motors subsidiary, has taken a step towards running its own self-driving taxi service--on the hilly, winding, pedestrian-swarmed streets of San Francisco. On Thursday, Cruise said the California Department of Motor Vehicles had granted it a permit to test up to five of its modified Chevy Bolts without anyone behind the wheel. In a blog post, Cruise CEO Dan Ammann said truly driverless cars would operate in the city before the end of the year.

The world's first self-driving electric-powered ride-sharing vehicle is here, but no word on when you'll actually be able to app-hail this robotaxi. Cruise, the self-driving car division of General Motors, unveiled the Origin on Tuesday night in a former Honda dealership just south of downtown. The six-passenger vehicle looks a bit like a small bus, has no steering wheel or pedals, and offers a cavernous area where two rows of three passengers face each other. In introducing the vehicle, Cruise CEO Dan Ammann, a former president of GM, told a crowd made up mostly of company employees that the Origin "is a production vehicle," adding that an announcement about where and when manufacturing will begin is coming soon. Kyle Vogt, Cruise's co-founder who sold the company to GM in 2016 for $1 billion and now serves as chief technology officer, said that being the first automotive or tech company to introduce a dedicated autonomous ride-sharing car doesn't guarantee success.

Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com General Motors is looking to "move beyond the car" with a shuttle that can move by itself. The automaker's autonomous vehicle subsidiary, Cruise, unveiled a self-driving shuttle prototype on Tuesday in San Francisco, and it doesn't have a steering wheel, foot pedals or any driver controls -- just seating for six accessed through large sliding doors. The all-electric Origin was designed to provide maximum passenger space and will eventually be deployed in a ride-hailing service run by Cruise. The company originally hoped to launch the service by the end of 2019 but delayed it to further develop the self-driving technology and the infrastructure required to operate a large network of vehicles.

Dan Ammann, former president of the largest Detroit automaker and now the CEO of Cruise, wrote in a blog post that to "make order-of-magnitude -- rather than incremental -- improvements in transportation, we need to build alternatives that are superior to the status quo in every way." The post was headlined "We Need to Move Beyond the Car." Cruise's mission, he said, is to "reduce congestion through making shared rides more compelling by providing an awesome experience at a radically lower cost." Only then, "will we truly move beyond the car to the transportation system that we deserve." Ammann did not elaborate on Cruise's plans in his post.

Before I go any further, I want to give a shoutout to Steve Eisman for suggesting this title in an interview. Eisman is the managing director at Neuberger Berman, but he's best known for being portrayed by Steve Carrell in 2015's the Big Short. Lately, he's been touting two key positions in his portfolio - a short position on Tesla (TSLA) and a long position in General Motors (GM). That latter bet is based on Eisman's belief that the company's turnaround is likely to be successful and that their self-driving car unit could already be worth more than the entire parent company. In the interview with ETN, he said someday a financial writer would write about this odd phenomenon, so that's exactly what I'm doing here.