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The news came via Slack message.
Cruise CEO Mark Whitten, who took the top job in June, posted a message Tuesday afternoon in the company’s advertising channel with a link to press release It’s titled “General Motors Refocuses Autonomous Driving Development on Personal Vehicles.”
General Motors, which acquired the self-driving car startup in 2016, will no longer fund the company, ending a task hundreds of Cruise engineers have worked on for years.
Minutes later, during an all-hands meeting, Cruz’s staff learned some additional details. The self-driving car company will be absorbed into parent company General Motors and combined with the automaker’s own efforts to develop driver-assistance features — and eventually fully autonomous personal vehicles. Whether their jobs would be secure or be made redundant was and remains unclear.
This meeting was short and unsatisfactory, according to one source, who noted that the senior leadership team was also surprised by this turn of events. Whitten, President and CTO Moe El-Shenawy, and Managing Director Craig Glidden led all efforts.
Several Cruise employees who spoke to TechCrunch on the condition of anonymity said they were “surprised” and “shocked” by the decision. One source told TechCrunch that employees learned of GM’s plans at the same time as the media.
Employees were told that they “should be proud” of themselves and that “technology will continue”, stating that there would be a restructuring process and that it would take several months before Cruz moved to the GM team.
Executives did not provide any details about potential layoffs, according to the sources. However, several employees told TechCrunch that they expect job cuts. Although details are scant, non-engineering roles or those related to robotics operations, including government affairs, communications teams, ground operations and remote assistance teams, are likely to be most at risk in cities where Cruise has slowly resumed testing, such as Phoenix. Houston and Dallas.
Our source told TechCrunch that they were on a roadmap to launch a self-driving service in Houston in 2025, and they didn’t expect it.
Cruise has been under pressure to market robotaxis — and generate revenue — for years. At some point, hopes and ambitions were high. In 2021, GM expects Cruise to have tens of thousands of specially designed robotaxis on the road that could generate $50 billion in annual revenue by the end of the decade.
The company was eventually forced to postpone its ambitious deadline, like many other autonomous vehicle startups.
In August 2023, Cruz finally received the final permit required by California regulators to operate commercially in San Francisco. Two months later, the company came under intense scrutiny following an incident on October 2, which left a pedestrian stuck underneath and then towed by one of its robotaxis. This incident, and Cruise’s actions in the immediate aftermath, resulted in Cruise losing its permits to operate in California, resulting in the grounding of its entire US fleet, the resignation of its co-founder and CEO Kyle Vogt, rounds of layoffs, and GM assuming more direct control of the company. What was once a promising self-driving startup.
Even as GM tried to rein in costs, all roads seemed to point to a restart.
In June, GM gave Cruise an $850 million lifeline to help it relaunch robo-taxi testing in Phoenix, Dallas and Houston. Cruise even signed a partnership agreement with Uber to launch a robotaxi on the Uber platform in 2025.
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