# Cruise shifted from retrofits to robotaxis as demand emerged

Markdown copy of https://realalpha.app/s/cruise-shifted-from-retrofits-to-robotaxis-as-demand-emerged/ on Real Alpha, the best minutes from long interviews with the people building AI. Cite and link the page, not this copy.

- Speaker: [Kyle Vogt](https://realalpha.app/builders/kyle-vogt/) · Kyle Vogt is cofounder of Twitch and Cruise, and CEO of The Bot Company. · Co-founded Cruise, a self-driving car company GM acquired, and now leads The Bot Company's household robots.
- Host: [Sarah Guo](https://realalpha.app/people/sarah-guo/) · Founder, Conviction · Ex-Greylock partner; early investor in Cognition, Harvey and Mistral.
- Host: [Elad Gil](https://realalpha.app/people/elad-gil/) · CEO, Gil & Co · Investor in Airbnb, Stripe, Coinbase and Anthropic; co-founded Color.
- Show: No Priors
- Episode: [No Priors Ep. 102 | With The Bot Company CEO Kyle Vogt](https://realalpha.app/v/6sDWmz3wQ9w/), Feb 20, 2025
- Moment: 0:44 to 3:17 of the episode (3 min), playing on https://realalpha.app/s/cruise-shifted-from-retrofits-to-robotaxis-as-demand-emerged/; the episode from there: https://realalpha.app/v/6sDWmz3wQ9w/?t=44

## Quote

> “And so suddenly there was like a **strong market pull for self-driving technology**, whereas before I had been seen as just kind of a cool sci-fi thing.”
> — [Kyle Vogt](https://realalpha.app/builders/kyle-vogt/) at [2:45](https://realalpha.app/v/6sDWmz3wQ9w/?t=165) · No Priors

## Takeaways

1. Cruise started with a retrofit system rather than a full robotaxi.
2. Uber and Lyft's driver costs created a clearer market pull.
3. Vogt says he pitched roughly 120 investors over a couple of years.

## About this segment

Kyle Vogt says Cruise first built a retrofit system, then shifted to robotaxis as Uber and Lyft exposed the cost of drivers. That market pull helped the company raise and build working prototypes.

From “No Priors Ep. 102 | With The Bot Company CEO Kyle Vogt”, Feb 20, 2025. [Watch the full episode](https://realalpha.app/v/6sDWmz3wQ9w/)

## Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

[0:49](https://realalpha.app/v/6sDWmz3wQ9w/?t=49) And back then, there wasn't really self-driving car technology like there was today. There was just Google working on, um, you know, their self-driving car project and rumor had it where they had spent like a hundred million dollars and they had the world's best engineers. And so going after something like that was a little bit crazy. And, you know, even after having worked on Twitch, you'd think there'd be enough credibility that as a repeat founder, I could go back and raise money.

[1:11](https://realalpha.app/v/6sDWmz3wQ9w/?t=71) But it turned out even that was like kind of a crazy enough idea and Twitch hadn't been acquired yet that I had a hard time. I had to scrape the bottom of the barrel to, to raise money. I pitched like 120 investors over the course of probably a couple of years to raise all the money we needed. But our thesis back then was very simple. We are going to start by finding, instead of going directly after what Google was doing with self-driving cars, they were trying to make the ultimate self-driving car, I think as a moonshot, we took an approach of what's the lean startup approach of this?

[1:41](https://realalpha.app/v/6sDWmz3wQ9w/?t=101) Can you build something that has the minimum quantum of utility that is maybe lower cost or easier to execute so you can get to market more quickly and move from there. And so we started with a retrofit system where we would take, you know, a regular car, put some sensors on it, a computer in the back and get it to drive. And we got that working pretty quickly, you know, kind of like an early version of Tesla full self-driving.

[2:01](https://realalpha.app/v/6sDWmz3wQ9w/?t=121) I think that was for just one car model too, right? That was like a BMW or something in the time. That is the challenge with a retrofit business. It's like without the blessing of the car makers, you have to kind of reverse engineer protocols and figure out how to attach motors to steering wheels. So it wasn't necessarily sustainable, but we were still going to, you know, try to figure that out. I'd say that peaked, you know, around the time we went to YC Demo Day and Sam Altman was in the car, actually, and we rode to, you know, turn it on and rode it to Demo Day.

[2:27](https://realalpha.app/v/6sDWmz3wQ9w/?t=147) And we took that product for about a year and a half. realized that we had done enough technically that maybe we didn't have to do this lean startup approach. Maybe we had just go straight after the big fish, which would be building robo taxis. And around that time, Uber and Lyft had sort of risen in popularity. And now we're becoming these household names and like, you know, talk of going public and all this kind of stuff. And they had this big hole in their unit economics, which is paying the drivers. And so suddenly there was like a strong market pull for self-driving technology, whereas before I had been seen as just kind of a cool sci-fi thing. And so we were able to raise some money from Spark Capital and go straight into that. Within a year of that, I think we were acquired by GM. You know, we had working

[3:05](https://realalpha.app/v/6sDWmz3wQ9w/?t=185) prototypes driving around San Francisco, obeying traffic lights, changing lanes, you know, going from point A to point B with an iPhone app, you know, back in 2015. That's pretty amazing. How