General Motors Co. announced today that it’s giving its troubled self-driving car unit, Cruise LLC, $850 million in funding while it works out what to do next in terms of its strategy and funding.

Bloomberg reported that the announcement was made by GM Chief Financial Officer Paul Jacobson at an investor conference in New York. He explained that GM is reviewing how it will fund the business going forward and will look at sources outside the automaker for cash. Jacobson also said that GM was considering the best way to use the technology developed by Cuise, be it for robotaxis, its current model, or for personally owned vehicles with part or full autonomy.

“I think this is a really important R&D phase, not just for the notion of robotaxi, but ultimately for personal autonomy,” Jacobson told investors. “It’s kind of a pay-as-you-go, but this buys us time to continue to pursue our strategic review.”

Trouble at Cruise, which has developed autonomous vehicles and was successfully trialing a robotic taxi service, started in September when reports emerged that two Cruise vehicles delayed an ambulance in San Francisco on Aug. 14, leading to a patient later dying in hospital.

On Oct. 2, a pedestrian who was hit by a car driven by a human driver was thrown into the path of a Cruise robotaxi. Instead of stopping, the Cruise vehicle dragged the woman 20 feet down the road before coming to a stop.

Following the two incidents, Cruise announced on Nov. 8 that it was recalling all of its 950 driverless vehicles. At the time, Cruise said the accident was the result of its “Collision Detection Subsystem” which “may cause the Cruise AV to attempt to pull over out of traffic instead of remaining stationary when a pullover is not the desired post-collision response.”

As a result, both Cruise Chief Executive Officer Kyle Vogt and Chief Product Officer Dan Kan quit the company later in November. With its C-suite jumping ship and its robotaxis grounded, it was then announced in December that Cruise was laying off 900 employees and nine additional executives.

Cruise recently started resuming testing its vehicles in Phoenix and Dallas again, but with trust in the vehicle’s safety aspects dented, it may be some time until it can assure both the public at large and investors that it’s safely back in the autonomous vehicle game.

Photo: Cruise