The "money burning war" of automatic driving continues, and the competition between Google and GM is upgraded

In 2022, the field of autonomous driving is still a hot spot for capital investment. Cruise, a self-driving technology company backed by General Motors, said Tuesday that SoftBank Group's Vision Fund will invest an additional $1.35 billion in it, while Cruise will prepare to launch an autonomous Robotaxi commercial ride-hailing service in San Francisco.

The SoftBank Vision Fund invested $900 million in the San Francisco-based startup in 2018 and pledged another $1.35 billion when Cruise was ready for commercial deployment, which was planned for 2019, but the commercialization process was later delayed by the pandemic.

Currently, in addition to having major shareholder GM, Cruise has also received significant investor support from Honda and Microsoft, and GM CEO Mary Barra said Cruise has no plans to go public in the near future.

Cruise founder and president Kyle Vogt said in a blog post that SoftBank's investment will help the company rapidly expand self-driving technology in San Francisco and more neighborhoods.

The company also said it will open a waiting list to the public starting Tuesday to sign up for the free ride service in San Francisco.

However, the commercialization of autonomous driving still requires a lot of investment before it can be truly promoted on a large scale.

As a leader in autonomous driving, Google Waymo's profitability is still far away. Google's parent company Alphabet released an earnings report on Monday showing that its other business units, including the self-driving car division Waymo, widened their losses to $5.3 billion in 2021, up from a $4.5 billion loss in 2020. In the fourth quarter of last year, the segment's revenue was $180 million, down slightly from a year ago. Google did not provide a financial outlook for the division for 2022.

"For RoboTaxi to really land, it is necessary to ensure three prerequisites, including full unmanned capabilities, large-scale coverage and high coverage density, so as to meet the needs of normal travel." Chinese autonomous driving technology company AutoX told the first financial reporter that only when breakthroughs are made in these three aspects, the large-scale landing of unmanned RoboTaxi can be gradually completed.

Last month, Auto X announced that the autonomous driving area in China totals more than 1,000 square kilometers, and roboTaxi service is one step closer to large-scale landing.

Xiao Jianxiong, founder and chairman of Auto X, repeatedly told the first financial reporter that a strict distinction should be made between "fully unmanned driving" and "assisted driving" to ensure the safety of vehicle driving.

Tesla recently recalled a "rolling stop" feature for the beta version of "Fully Autonomous Driving" (FSD) through OTAs, which first appeared in FSD version 10.3, allowing cars to ignore stop signs at intersections and pass at lower speeds. Relevant regulators believe that the name "fully autonomous driving" is misleading, because the term usually refers to true level 4 autonomous driving, while Tesla's system only provides level 2 advanced assisted driving. Tesla expects the next OTA version to fix the problem to be released in early February.