Cruise lays off nearly a quarter of its staff after grounding its robotaxi fleet

Table Of Content

• Cruise confirms layoffs in robotaxi maintenance roles
• Crash-Proof Stocks to Buy Immediately
• Naked Short Selling? Citadel Says DJT Stock CEO Devin Nunes Is Just a 'Loser.'
• Crisis At Cruise: Robotaxi CEO Confirms Coming Layoffs Amid Scramble To Rebuild Public Trust
• Electric scooter rider critically injured in hit-and-run identified as Bob’s Donuts baker
• Lucid slashes prices for its luxury EVs for the third time in seven months
• Cruise robotaxis in crisis: Layoffs, recall, and algorithm found to have blind spot for kids
• Cruise lays off nearly a quarter of its staff after grounding its robotaxi fleet

Cruise is targeting non-engineering jobs in the layoffs, particularly those people who worked in the field, commercial operations and corporate staffing, according to the email. The company has also ended additional assignments of contingent workers who supported its driverless operations. Engineering, a category that makes up the bulk of the Cruise workforce, is largely being preserved, according to the content of the email and discussions with internal sources.

Cruise confirms layoffs in robotaxi maintenance roles

Cruise lays off nearly a quarter of its staff after grounding its robotaxi fleet - The Verge

Cruise lays off nearly a quarter of its staff after grounding its robotaxi fleet.

Posted: Thu, 14 Dec 2023 08:00:00 GMT [source]

Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings Ltd., another large operator, told investors it’s had to limit capacity on the Pride of America because of staffing. The ship, which sails the Hawaiian islands, is required to have a crew that’s mostly US citizens, a tall order in this tight labor market. The materials note results from simulated tests in which a Cruise vehicle is in the vicinity of a small child. “Based on the simulation results, we can’t rule out that a fully autonomous vehicle might have struck the child,” reads one assessment. In another test drive, a Cruise vehicle successfully detected a toddler-sized dummy but still struck it with its side mirror at 28 miles per hour.

Crash-Proof Stocks to Buy Immediately

And financial pressures have been mounting for start-ups that sell sensors and other technology to self-driving car companies. Further, a majority of collisions involving Waymo represented low-speed affairs initially stemming from other (human) drivers. As well, during incidents where a Waymo driverless car hit another vehicle, the counterparties were not blameless, leaving little ability for the Waymo car to avoid the collision. Contributing to the woes that eventually sparked the General Motors layoffs, Bloomberg reported in late October that Cruise grounded its entire fleet.

Naked Short Selling? Citadel Says DJT Stock CEO Devin Nunes Is Just a 'Loser.'

After information shared during all-staff meetings by company leadership, including then-CEO Kyle Vogt, was leaked to the media, the employee said executives became much less transparent in company-wide meetings, breeding more mistrust in recent weeks. The laid-off employee said there were only mentions of “small operational drawdowns” among temporary workers who were not getting their contracts renewed or staff to support operations in markets where Cruise has paused deployment. Cruise announced it would be pausing driverless operations for a review by independent experts and later recalled all 950 of its cars to update software. The employment actions come following an initial analysis of the 2 October crash and the company response after a Cruise robotaxi ran over and injured a pedestrian who had been hit by another vehicle driven by a human. The cuts at Cruise add to a tumultuous fall for the robotaxi company, which until recently was ,along with Alphabet’s Waymo. California regulators in October suspended Cruise’s permit to operate in San Francisco—home to its longest-running test bed—as they alleged the company failed to disclose details of a crash that sent a pedestrian to the hospital with serious injuries.

Crisis At Cruise: Robotaxi CEO Confirms Coming Layoffs Amid Scramble To Rebuild Public Trust

In October, the California Department of Motor Vehicles on Tuesday suspended Cruise's deployment and testing permits for its autonomous vehicles, effective immediately. This week, the company, which has 4,000 employees, started laying off contingent workers who support the driverless fleet, with more layoffs to follow, according to TechCrunch. “We are simplifying and focusing our efforts to return with an exceptional service in one city to start with,” ElShenawy wrote. “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 [autonomous vehicles],” the letter said. For Cruise, a General Motors subsidiary, which rushed to scale its operations on an aggressive timeline that seemed to prioritize growth over safety, the sudden turn of events is a sign that a more considered rollout might have been wiser. On October 2, a Cruise car hit and dragged a San Francisco pedestrian who had been struck earlier by another car.

Electric scooter rider critically injured in hit-and-run identified as Bob’s Donuts baker

But it was a crash with an emergency response vehicle that began to chip away at the company’s seemingly impenetrable exterior. The layoffs follow a series of missteps in recent months that culminated in the California Department of Motor Vehicles suspending the company’s driverless vehicle permit. The California Public Utilities Commission pulled Cruise’s permit, which allowed it to charge for robotaxi rides, soon after. The agencies suspended Cruise’s permits after an October 2 incident, in which a pedestrian who was struck by a human driver and then landed in the adjacent lane, was then run over by a  Cruise robotaxi.

GM’s driverless car subsidiary has announced a round of layoffs this week, with the CEO Kyle Vogt reportedly telling employees in an all-hands meeting. Plus, investigations have dredged up some incriminating news that the software’s algorithm had trouble detecting children. Cruise, General Motors’ self-driving development subsidiary, will lay off almost a quarter of its workforce—about 900 employees—the company announced Thursday.

Weeks following the October mishap, California’s department of motor vehicles in effect shut down the robotaxi service by suspending its license to operate in the state. California regulators have alleged that Cruise covered up how bad the October crash was – which could result in a potential penalty of roughly $1.5m. The robotaxi service is also being investigated by US auto safety regulators after separately receiving reports of potential risks to pedestrians and passengers. Some of the safety measures described in the Wednesday blog post include naming a new interim chief safety officer and retaining law and engineering firms to examine and analyze the Oct. 2 incident.

Cruise lays off nearly a quarter of its staff after grounding its robotaxi fleet

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. In a Wednesday blog post, the company also announced it plans to carry out additional measures to help rebuild consumer trust and shore up safety protocols. General Motors-owned Cruise announced a recall of all its vehicles to allow for software upgrades this week. The recall was due to an Oct. 2 incident where a woman was dragged by a Cruise vehicle after another vehicle knocked her into its path. The DMV suspension came a week after federal auto safety regulators announced they were investigating Cruise following pedestrian injuries.

Jon McNeill, who joined the Cruise board last month, has been appointed vice chairman of the board, serving alongside GM CEO Mary Barra. Cruise has said it will eventually relaunch its driverless ridehail operations in just one city. The company will also “prioritize” the Chevy Bolt platform it uses for its fleet, indicating that production of its Origin shuttle without steering wheel and pedals will remain indefinitely paused.

That has been pared back to relaunching its robotaxis in a single, yet-to-be-determined market. Also among the cuts, according to Bloomberg, was Prashanthi Raman, Cruise’s vice president of government affairs. Raman was featured in a promotional video last year where she rode around San Francisco in a Cruise robotaxi alongside former Mayor Willie Brown. General Motors, which announced it would be cutting spending on the self-driving car company by “hundreds of millions of dollars,” has been in the process of clearing out much of Cruise’s leadership. These positions spanned departments including software development, marketing, recruiting, accounting and operations. As part of their total compensation, Cruise employees would receive some cash salary and also would receive another portion as company stock.

Regulators accused Cruise of omitting footage of its car dragging the woman from a video that it provided to state officials. The letter said they would stay on the payroll through 12 February and are eligible for another eight weeks of pay. Long-term employees will get another two weeks of pay for every year at the company over three years, the letter said. A Cruise representative also told CNBC that the company's goal is now to work on a fully driverless L4 service, as well as relaunching ride-hailing in one city to start. McNeill, who joined the Cruise board recently and was previously chief operating officer at Lyft and president of Tesla, now serves alongside GM Chair and CEO Mary Barra. "We are still working through what that means for the company and who's going to be affected by that and we don't have all the answers yet," Vogt said, according to Forbes.