GM to cut half of Cruise staff
After GM increased its Cruise stake from 90 to 100 per cent, the company only wants to take on around half of Cruise’s 2,300 employees. The other half must leave the company within 60 days. Among the employees who will lose their jobs are top managers, including CEO Marc Whitten, Head of Human Resources Nilka Thomas and Head of Technology Mo Elshenawy. Mainly people working as technical developers are expected to stay on.
The reason for the wave of redundancies is GM’s cost-cutting programme. Since the acquisition of Cruise in 2016, the company has invested over ten billion US dollars in Cruise, primarily in technology for autonomous driving and the development and operation of its own robotaxi service. The company now wants to save one billion US dollars per year in this area – and has realised that the robotaxi business is too costly and that Google’s sister company Waymo is ahead. The Amazon subsidiary Zoox is also ready to take off.
General Motors wants to continue to utilise the expertise gained at Cruise and thus take over around half of the workforce. Cruise will be merged with other technical departments of General Motors to form a joint unit that will focus on further developing the ‘Super Cruise’ driver assistance system for private cars – until they can also drive fully autonomously.
“By combining the specialised technology and talent at Cruise with our team developing Super Cruise, we’ll have the ability to accelerate our work on both assisted-driving and autonomous driving,” said Dave Richardson, senior vice president of software and services engineering. “We look forward to teaming with Cruise to accelerate our work together.”
Cruise had once aggressively expanded into many US cities as a robotaxi service, but had to temporarily suspend its operations after one of its vehicles dragged a pedestrian around six metres in an accident in San Francisco in October 2023. Although the vehicle apparently recognised the collision at the time, it did not realise that the woman was lying under the car after the crash. Cruise is said to have withheld information from the authorities when investigating the accident, which is why it was fined 1.5 million US dollars.
In the summer of 2024, Cruise began putting its vehicles back on the roads in several US cities, initially only with safety drivers on board who could intervene in dangerous situations. Cruise has since informed its customers that the service will be discontinued.
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