GM’s recent decision to slam on the brakes on its $10 billion Cruise robotaxi project might have sounded like a blow to the entire future of the robotaxi concept. But that’s not how one executive at Micron Technology thinks.
Competitors are moving ahead with pilot projects and rollouts and Micron expects to take advantage of their need for memory technology. Micron is the only memory maker based in the US and holds the largest share globally of memory products used in automotive.
Despite its historical success across a range of memory and storage products, Micron shares nosedived by more than 17% on Thursday following fiscal second quarter guidance of revenues at $8.1 billion, down from expectations on Wall Street of nearly $9 billion. (Revenues for the first fiscal quarter were in line with analyst estimates at $8.7 billion and earnings at $1.79 a share.)
Robotaxi competitors Waymo, Baidu and Tesla have different approaches to robotaxi autonomy, but a top Micron official said technology is only a part of the total equation for robotaxi success. “It’s a question of how practical and cost-effective [robotaxi] is. It’s just the economics of it,” Bruce Franklin, senior director of automotive at Micron, told Fierce Electronics.
Even so, making an autonomous vehicle for robotaxi use at Level 3 autonomy or higher “is a little bit of a space shot,” Franklin told Fierce Electronics in an interview. The long lead time to design and produce any vehicle takes years, while the long development and production life span for a reliable and safe robotaxi used to take 10 to 15 years. “Now, that [time frame] is contracting but it’s still a lot of development time,” he said. For Micron, having the right memory technology for a particular robotaxi or autonomous vehicle requires planning about five years in advance “or the right product won’t come. That’s a key challenge and we feel we’re the best there.”
Robotaxis will require high band width memory components for processing required for guidance and safety. HBM3E and HBM4 “will happen in quick succession” and require a longer development time. “We’re definitely engaged with robotaxi and that’s where the hard problems are,” Franklin said. “The fringe of the market is where the hard problems are. We always want to have costs under control and want to use all the latest designs and engage with early adopters to be able to influence designs.”
The problems for GM Cruise came out of the need to continue to invest in robotaxi work against tough competition, even as the company faced fines and a shutdown as the result of a 2022 accident in San Francisco.
RELATED: GM hits the brakes on Cruise robotaxis after spending billions
Regulatory concerns are admittedly “huge,” Franklin said, and chiefly under the purview of Micron’s customers, although Micron has a role in safety given the critical nature of memory in compute that governs functions like lane centering. “We’re helping customers of course with safety and reliability—that’s core to everything we’re thinking about and we’re constantly working with them. While the market is small, there’s room to experiment.”
Globally, there are dozens of companies engaged in creating autonomous vehicles of which robotaxis are a small share. “We want to work with everybody,” Franklin said.
“Robotaxi is still early and very small,” he said, adding there is potential for reuse of memory technology concepts being used in robotaxis for other tech, including smartphones and data centers. “The technology has longevity.”