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L2 Blue Cruise Deployment @ Ford
Ford provided an update on its L2 Blue Cruise deployments during its recent earnings call. Almost 700,000 vehicles are now in operation with over 300M hands-free miles driven. Pricing was recently reduced. Ford is still developing L3 capability internally (for highway pilot) but is also looking at 3^rd party solutions.

Ioki provides software for Swiss Autonomous Driving Project
Ioki, a Deutsche Bahn company, is providing software for an autonomous driving project in Zurich, to connect rural areas to public transport. The project is using Nissan vehicles with WeRide’s AV software than can be booked on an app developed by Ioki, which also provides the route planning for the vehicles. The pilot phase starts in the spring of 2025. 

GM Provides Guidance on Super Cruise adoption
On the GM  Q4 24 earnings call, Mary Barra said that ending Cruise robotaxi development will lead to approximately $1B a year savings. The team has been refocused to passenger car ADAS development and the L2+ Super Cruise system is rolling out on more models in 2025. GM claims 60% of its 360K customers who purchased it use it regularly and they expect the fleet to double in size in 2025. The system is offered with a 3 year trial on some models and at the end of the trial about 20% of owners signed up for the continuing subscription at $25 per month. GM aims to approach $2B in annual revenue from Super Cruise within 5 years.   

Tesla provides robotaxi update
Tesla provided an update on its autonomous driving efforts during the Q4 ’24 earnings call. FSD was significantly enhanced by adding the “cortex” training cluster in Austin which will consist of more than 100,000 Nvidia H100/H200 boards. Accumulated capex spend on AI reached $5B. Robotaxi service is planned to be launched in Austin TX in June. Tesla already has cars driving around unsupervised in its factories in California from line-end to their parking spots.

User experience seems to validate major improvements in the latest release of FSD, but going from supervised to unsupervised operation is still a major leap, if for no other reason than achieving validation and  regulatory requirements. Elon has been consistently optimistic in his timelines but for sure they are making progress towards this goal. 

Continental announces partnership for driverless trucks
Continental is working with Aurora and Nvidia to deliver a level 4 autonomous truck solution for mass production in 2027. The platform will run Nvidia’s DriveOS running on the DRIVE Thor compute platform. Aurora is close to launching driverless operations and is closing its safety test cases and final validation. Aurora plans to start driving in April 2025 between Dallas and Houston using prototypes of the Continental hardware.

Cruise lays off half its staff
As the GM integration continues, Cruise has laid off around half its staff (around 1000 people). NHTSA also closed its evaluation of Cruise’s automated driving system after the safety recall and no more operations remain on public roads.

NHTSA upgrading probe into Ford BlueCruise™
NHSTA announced it is upgrading a probe (to do engineering analysis) into 129K Ford vehicles after collisions involving BlueCruise hands-free driving technology. In fatal collisions last year, Ford Mustang Mach-Es travelling at over 70mph on highways during nighttime conditions hit stationary vehicles. AEB in high-speed night-time conditions is challenging for camera only based systems and this is another example of the sort of problems that auto makers can face.