Table Of Content
- October 2023
- GM's Cruise slashes contractor roles after driverless car suspension
- Different Types of Compensation Plans & Benefits
- GM tells its Cruise employees 24% of them will be laid off 'through no fault of their own'
- Tracey Franklin on Building an Engine of Innovation Through Talent
- SixThreeZero Electric Rickshaw review: This fun e-bike can carry an entire family!
In response, several top executives have left the company, including co-founder and CEO Kyle Vogt and chief product officer Dan Kan. Nine more executive were dismissed yesterday, including chief legal and policy officer Jeff Bleich and senior vice president of government affairs David Estrada. Cruise’s troubles can be traced to an Oct. 2 crash when a car hit a woman at an intersection in San Francisco and flung her into the path of one of Cruise’s driverless taxis.
October 2023
Cruise today vs Cruise moving forwardAs we've shared, our goal is to focus our work on a fully driverless L4 service that meets a new AV performance bar, prioritize the Bolt platform, relaunch ridehail in one city to start, and enhance our safety standards and processes before we scale. We are ceasing work on the Origin MY24 but not losing sight of our work on future programs. This is very different from our prior plans to expand into more than a dozen new cities in 2024. The company had 3,800 employees before Thursday's cuts, which also follow a round of contractor layoffs at Cruise last month. Affected employees will receive paychecks until Feb. 12 and at least an additional eight weeks of pay, plus severance based on tenure.
GM's Cruise slashes contractor roles after driverless car suspension
On October 2, a Cruise car hit and dragged a San Francisco pedestrian who had been struck earlier by another car. Earlier this month, according to audio leaked to Forbes from an all-hands meeting, CEO Kyle Vogt confirmed that staff layoffs were coming. Cruise, General Motors’ self-driving development subsidiary, will lay off almost a quarter of its workforce—about 900 employees—the company announced Thursday.
Self-driving company Cruise will lay off 67 workers at Seattle-area engineering hub - GeekWire
Self-driving company Cruise will lay off 67 workers at Seattle-area engineering hub.
Posted: Tue, 19 Dec 2023 08:00:00 GMT [source]
Different Types of Compensation Plans & Benefits
The company intended to shift toward a custom-built autonomous vehicle called the Origin. GM said in the post that laid off workers will get pay through April 8, "plus continued subsidized health benefits, RSU vesting, the January 5 bonus, and additional immigration support for those holding work visas" will continue to be factors. On Wednesday, as first reported by Reuters,, the company said it had parted with nine top executives, including leaders in legal, government affairs, commercial operations, and safety and systems, as part of a safety review triggered by the San Francisco crash.
A barrage of safety concerns and incidents have plagued Cruise self-driving car, since it received approval in August for round-the-clock robotaxi service in San Francisco. Cruise leaders have said the goal is to focus on a fully driverless service, prioritizing the Bolt platform, and it will slow down its commercialization to improve safety. Cruise announced a round of layoffs Thursday affecting contract workers who worked on its driverless ridehailing service, CNBC has learned. The cuts included those who help with cleaning vehicles, fleet charging and fielding customer support inquiries.
Tracey Franklin on Building an Engine of Innovation Through Talent
The subsidiary announced the cuts on Thursday in a letter to Cruise’s 3,800 workers from its president and chief technical officer, Mo ElShenawy, who wrote that the layoffs were not the fault of the workers. The job cuts come a day after Cruise confirmed that nine key leaders are no longer with the company amid an ongoing investigation into an October crash involving one of its driverless robotaxis that forced it to suspend operations. Cruise, the GM self-driving car subsidiary, has started laying off contingent workers after pausing all of it driverless operations and losing key commercial permits that allowed it to operate a robotaxi service in San Francisco. "Today, we are making staff reductions that will affect 24% of full-time Cruisers, through no fault of their own," the company said in a blog post on its website. "We are simplifying and focusing our efforts to return with an exceptional service in one city to start with and focusing on the Bolt platform for this first step before we scale. As a result, we are reducing our employee counts in operations and other areas."
Since the GM Cruise accident, its self-driving car robotaxi fleet has been grounded, pending the results of independent safety probes; its leadership has been gutted. Also Cruise self-driving car production has been halted; hundreds of vehicles have been recalled; and local and federal government officials have launched their own investigations, among other concerns. GM Cruise workforce was about 3,800 before Thursday’s cuts, which also follow a round of Cruise layoffs of contractor last month. Affected employees will receive paychecks until Feb 12 and at least an additional eight weeks of pay, plus severance based on tenure.
Former Cruise employees have told Forbes that they understood that it was meant to shore up company morale in 2022 and demonstrate to the company’s workforce that GM backed Cruise so much that it was willing to be a regular private buyer of the stock. On Thursday, Cruise abruptly ended a program allowing employees and alumni to sell company stock back to its corporate parent, General Motors. Both current and former workers were informed in a company-wide email sent around 9 a.m. Earlier this month, the Free Press reported that a California administrative law judge ordered Cruise to explain why it it should not be fined for "misleading" California regulators for initially failing to disclose that the car dragged the woman 20 feet before it stopped. "We are confident in the team and committed to supporting Cruise as they set the company up for long-term success with a focus on trust, accountability and transparency," Ridella said. GM has been investing in Cruise since 2016 to the tune of about $8 billion so far, the Free Press has reported.
SixThreeZero Electric Rickshaw review: This fun e-bike can carry an entire family!
Videos of Cruise robotaxis blocking traffic and driving into a construction site were shared on social media. But it was a crash with an emergency response vehicle that began to chip away at the company’s seemingly impenetrable exterior. The discontinuation of Cruise’s RLO program comes amid an ongoing crisis at the company.
Vendors will make their own determination about severance for those workers, according to Testo. The accident — and its fallout — have called into question the future of the tech and auto industry’s pursuit of self-driving cars. Since Google started working on the first autonomous vehicle more than a decade ago, dozens of companies have poured tens of billions of dollars into building software and persuading regulators to permit testing on roads around the country. Cruise, the embattled GM self-driving car subsidiary, is laying off 900 employees, or about 24% of its workforce, TechCrunch has exclusively learned. The layoffs are part of a plan to slash costs and attempt to revamp the company following an October 2 incident that left a pedestrian stuck under and then dragged by one of its robotaxis. As a result of our decision to slow down commercialization, we are restructuring to focus on delivering the improvements to our tech and vehicle performance that will build trust in our AVs.
Cruise slashes 24% of self-driving car workforce in sweeping layoffs - TechCrunch
Cruise slashes 24% of self-driving car workforce in sweeping layoffs.
Posted: Thu, 14 Dec 2023 08:00:00 GMT [source]
The DMV suspension came a week after federal auto safety regulators announced they were investigating Cruise following pedestrian injuries. The probe, spearheaded by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, was prompted by multiple reports involving pedestrian injuries and Cruise vehicles in recent months, and it concerns an estimated 594 self-driving Cruise vehicles, according to the filing. In the aftermath, the company hired two outside law firms to review Cruise’s safety protocols as well as determine whether Cruise purposefully withheld video footage from the California DMV of its driverless vehicle dragging the hit-and-run victim to the side of the road. The company issued a voluntary recall of all 950 Cruise vehicles earlier this month to update the software to prevent similar incidents in the future.
As you might have learned, yesterday, we took action to part ways with several SLT members. Craig and I believe this is a necessary step, and our leadership team and the board are fully aligned with how our go-forward U.S. staffing needs will map to the priorities ahead of us, and set up Cruise for the long term. We have also ended additional assignments of contingent workers who support our driverless operations, as we refined our go forward plans.
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