General Motors shut down Cruise, its $10 billion robotaxi division, in December 2024. Eighteen months later, the company’s chief product officer says GM’s autonomous vehicles will eventually be capable of operating as robotaxis anyway. Sterling Anderson, the former head of Tesla’s Autopilot program, told Business Insider that GM’s personal autonomy strategy and the robotaxi business model are on a collision course.

“Ultimately, the two converge. Our operating region looks identical to the operating region of a robotaxi company,” Anderson said. “The question at that point becomes, ‘Why not offer them in a robotaxi-type application as well?‘”

Anderson’s approach starts with highway driving and works outward. GM is breaking the driving experience into segments, tackling long stretches of motorway first before expanding to arterial roads and urban centres. The idea is that by the time the system handles enough road types, the coverage area will be indistinguishable from what a dedicated robotaxi operator needs.

The foundation for that expansion is Super Cruise, GM’s hands-off, eyes-on driver assistance system. In April, GM said customers had driven one billion hands-free miles with the feature across roughly 750,000 vehicles covering 700,000 miles of North American roads. The company plans to introduce eyes-off highway driving on the Cadillac Escalade IQ in 2028, upgrading Super Cruise from a Level 2+ system to Level 3 using lidar, radar, and cameras.

To build the technology, GM has been quietly reassembling the team it dismantled. The Information reported that the company has rehired approximately 100 former Cruise employees, including senior managers who have returned to their previous roles. GM also hired Ronalee Mann, a former Cruise and Tesla executive, to lead product operations under Anderson, and has recruited engineers from Nvidia, Uber, and Zoox.

The rehiring is a reversal from a painful exit. GM acquired Cruise in 2016 for $581 million and spent more than $10 billion on the division before pulling the plug. The shutdown followed a 2023 incident in San Francisco in which a Cruise robotaxi dragged a pedestrian who had been hit by another vehicle, prompting California regulators to suspend the company’s driverless licence.

Anderson was hired in May 2025 with a $40 million compensation package and has since emerged as a potential successor to CEO Mary Barra. Before GM, he co-founded Aurora Innovation, which launched the first commercial fully driverless trucking service in the US, operating between Houston and Dallas. His appointment signalled that GM was serious about autonomy even after abandoning the dedicated robotaxi model.

The competitive landscape has shifted considerably since Cruise’s collapse. Waymo now delivers more than 500,000 paid rides per week across 10 US metro areas and is deploying its cheaper sixth-generation Ojai robotaxi to scale further. Tesla has launched a limited robotaxi service in Austin using a camera-only approach. Amazon’s Zoox operates roughly 50 robotaxis in San Francisco and Las Vegas.

Legacy automakers are also moving. Hyundai-backed Motional relaunched a robotaxi service with Uber in Las Vegas in March and plans to offer fully driverless rides there by the end of 2026. Rivian signed a $1.25 billion deal with Uber in March to deploy up to 50,000 autonomous R2 vehicles across 25 cities by 2031, starting in San Francisco and Miami in 2028.

GM’s strategy is a slower, lower-risk path than building a standalone robotaxi fleet. By embedding autonomy in personal vehicles first, the company avoids the enormous capital expenditure of operating its own ride-hailing network while still accumulating the driving data and regulatory approvals it would need to enter that market later. The one billion Super Cruise miles already driven give GM a dataset that few competitors outside Tesla and Waymo can match.

Whether the approach works depends on execution speed. GM is targeting eyes-off highway driving in 2028, the same year Rivian’s autonomous R2s are expected to start carrying Uber passengers. “If that’s where the world goes, our autonomous vehicles will be capable of being robotaxis as well,” Anderson said.

For the past 10 years, Uber’s annual Lost & Found Index has provided a rather quirky anthropological snapshot of its riders — and even a few insights into society. The annual catalogue of millions of forgotten items ranges from mundane modern-day tools such as smartphones and laptops, to more eyebrow-raising objects like live fish, an ankle monitor, a toboggan, a package of live butterflies, and a single Louboutin shoe.

This year, Uber is using the report to highlight the same old problem of lost items with a new twist: robotaxis. Thousands of items (it’s a bit too new for millions) were left behind in robotaxis on Uber’s ride-hailing network in the past year, the company said Tuesday. There were the usual suspects of phones, keys, wallets, passports, and headphones, along with a few items that strayed into the who-is-this-rider category: a set of dentures, an “I Heart Hot Dads” bag, and a blue hat that reads “Emotional Support Human.”

Beyond this entertaining list lies a business opportunity, if a minor one. Even in a future of robot taxis, someone still has to return the things passengers leave behind.

Uber has spent the past several years locking up dozens of partnerships with autonomous vehicle (AV) technology companies. But it really wasn’t until March 2025, when the “Waymo on Uber” robotaxi service launched in Austin, that the commercial wheels on its AV business started turning. Since then, Uber and Waymo have also started a robotaxi service in Atlanta. Uber has added other AV companies to its app in the past year, including Motional in Las Vegas and Avride in Dallas, although these still have human safety operators behind the wheel.

That Uber has already logged thousands of lost items in just 12 months gives some sense of just how many robotaxi rides have been completed on its app. The underlying message here is that Uber’s existing network is already set up to reunite riders with their lost items, including a 15-pound yo-yo, one large black marble duck, a Squishmallow, and a Charli XCX poster.

When an Uber rider forgets belongings in a robotaxi, the process for recovering them is similar to any other Uber ride: open the app, click the activity tab, select the trip during which the item was lost, and contact customer support. Riders are then able to message, chat, or call a support agent. If the item is located, they have two options: pay $15 for an Uber Courier driver to provide same-day local delivery, or pick up the belonging in person from an AV depot, where the vehicles are stored and serviced.

Uber Courier is a rebrand of Uber Connect, which launched in 2020 and allowed users to send packages and personal items between local addresses. But Uber says there is more to its robotaxi support network than repurposing existing services.

“With tens of millions of lost items reported on Uber each year, we’ve spent the last decade building systems that help riders quickly and seamlessly reunite with their belongings,” Amy Satrom, global head of autonomous support at Uber, said in a statement. “As autonomous rides continue to scale on Uber, we’re bringing that same expertise to AVs — combining our fleet operations, support teams, and hybrid network to make getting a lost item back simple, even when there’s no driver behind the wheel.”

In February, the company announced Uber Autonomous Solutions, a new business division that conveys its bigger ambitions around driverless tech. The division provides companies with a suite of services that handle all the tasks associated with operating a robotaxi, self-driving truck, or sidewalk delivery robot business, including software and support services.

And Uber clearly means to make AVs a major revenue driver. The company plans to offer robotaxi rides through its app in as many as 15 cities globally by the end of the year and has said it intends to be the largest facilitator of AV trips in the world by 2029.