Cruise is laying off 50 percent of its workforce as GM plans on sunsetting its robitaxi initiative. Instead, the company will focus on its Super Cruise system.
On Monday, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) fined Cruise, GM’s self-driving vehicle division, $1.5 million. The company omitted key details from an October 2023 accident in San Francisco.
Autonomous vehicle outfit Cruise is slowly returning to operation in California following an incident in which a pedestrian was struck and dragged by a robotaxi for approximately 20 feet in October 2023.
Cruise will start re-deploying its autonomous vehicles in Phoenix, Arizona after a major upheaval last year that led to a pause in its operations. However, the robotaxis will have human drivers behind the wheel.
Waymo has announced that its Waymo One driverless cars will be hitting the highways in Phoenix soon. The driverless vehicles were already on regular Phoenix streets.
Both Gm-backed Cruise and Google-backed Waymo came into 2023 riding high on growing public interest and increasing corporate investment, but only one would make it to 2024 intact.
Cruise is laying off 24 percent of its workforce, the company confirmed to Engadget. GM’s self-driving subsidiary says it will cut approximately 900 employees.
A few weeks after Cruise's CEO Kyle Vogt and co-founder Daniel Kan resigned, the company has also dismissed nine executives considered as "key" figures for the firm.
GM has announced it is massively cutting spending on its Cruise driverless car platform, which had been used to operate robotaxis in California. This comes after a pedestrian collision that forced the state’s DMV to pull Cruise’s driverless permits.
Cruise, the autonomous vehicle company owned by General Motors, has issued a recall for 950 of its robotaxis following a collision with a pedestrian in San Francisco last month. California also pulled its permit to operate driverless vehicles in the state.