General Motors CEO Mary Barra still thinks an autonomous vehicle with no steering wheel or pedals is "definitely" in her company's future, though she recently suspended work on the purpose-built Origin.

Speaking to the crowd at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 on Tuesday, Barra revealed that she is still after a robotaxi without a steering wheel but called the decision to kill Origin after an exhausting, years-long attempt to change the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS).

"I probably have been working on it for six, seven years now," Barra said onstage. "There came a point earlier this year where we said: 'How much harder can we go when we don't have the legislative change?' And then if you look at how hard it is to get a new law passed right now, we decided that we had to make the right decision."

That decision came this July, after months of controversy at GM's self-driving subsidiary Cruise. When it canceled the Origin project, GM took a charge of $583 million. The company had once projected that it would make Origins "in the tens of thousands."

On the Disrupt Stage, Barra said that she "absolutely" still believes people will one day buy their own personal autonomous vehicles. "We're going to see how it unfolds and how consumers leverage the technology," she said.

She however maintained that the development of technology in self-driving cars happened longer than she thought they would. "I think we all thought in that 2016, 2017 time frame it was going to go much more quickly," she said.