GM Faces Speed Bumps With Driverless Cars

It’s one of the biggest bets going in the world of cars. Since May, General Motors Co and its Cruise self-driving car unit have landed $5 billion in investment commitments from Japan’s SoftBank Group Corp and Honda Motor Co Ltd to develop a robot taxi service that could safely navigate the city streets of San Francisco by the end of next year - putting it ahead Alphabet Inc’s Waymo self-driving car unit, Uber and Lyft. Those expectations are now hitting speed bumps, according to interviews with eight current and former GM and Cruise employees and executives, along with nine autonomous vehicle technology experts familiar with Cruise. These sources say that some unexpected technical challenges - including the difficulty that Cruise cars have identifying whether objects are in motion - mean putting GM’s driverless cars on the road in a large scale way in 2019 is looking highly unlikely.

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