General Motors Layoffs 2023: What to Know About the Latest Cruise Job Cuts

Table Of Content

• GM’s Cruise slashes more than 900 jobs after recalling robotaxis
• Cruise lays off nearly a quarter of its staff after grounding its robotaxi fleet
• Cruise Ends Stock Buybacks For Employees Amid Ongoing Safety Crisis
• Laid-off Cruise worker dishes on lingering impact of San Francisco crash on robotaxi company
• ‘Trust nurses, not AI’: Workers protest use of artificial intelligence at Kaiser hospitals
• Lucid slashes prices for its luxury EVs for the third time in seven months
• Massive Layoffs Hit Troubled Robotaxi Developer Cruise

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.

GM’s Cruise slashes more than 900 jobs after recalling robotaxis

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.

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

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.

Cruise Ends Stock Buybacks For Employees Amid Ongoing Safety Crisis

This is one of the hardest days we've had so far because so many talented people are leaving. I'm thankful we had the chance to work together, and I know I speak on behalf of so many Cruisers who will be reaching out to those departing to help with our professional networks and references. On behalf of the SLT, the Cruise Board and GM, I'm truly grateful to everyone who has played a role in building Cruise and who has poured so much into the promise of making our roads safer and our world better. In a few moments, you will receive an email letting you know whether or not you are affected by this staffing reduction. We knew this day was coming, but that does not make it any less difficult—especially for those whose jobs are affected. In GM's third-quarter earnings update, the company said it had lost roughly $1.9 billion on Cruise through September of this year.

Laid-off Cruise worker dishes on lingering impact of San Francisco crash on robotaxi company

Embattled tech company Cruise slashed 376 jobs in San Francisco - SFGATE

Embattled tech company Cruise slashed 376 jobs in San Francisco.

Posted: Fri, 15 Dec 2023 08:00:00 GMT [source]

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.

‘Trust nurses, not AI’: Workers protest use of artificial intelligence at Kaiser hospitals

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. The company told employees the decision was made for a few reasons, including that driverless operations had been paused or “deprioritized as we focus on supervised driving for the time being,” according to an internal message sent early Thursday morning and viewed by TechCrunch. The accident — and its fallout — have called into question the future of the tech and auto industry’s pursuit of self-driving cars.

Cruise wants to “enhance our safety standards and processes before we scale,” company co-president and CTO Mo ElShenawy wrote in a letter to employees announcing the layoffs today. A company blog post said that 24 percent of full-time Cruise employees will be let go, with a focus on field and commercial operations, and corporate staffing, though some engineers are also affected. The company had already cut last month a portion of its contingent workforce who kept self-driving vehicles clean, charged, and maintained. The news follows a barrage of safety concerns and incidents since Cruise, owned by General Motors, received approval in August for round-the-clock robotaxi service in San Francisco.

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.

Massive Layoffs Hit Troubled Robotaxi Developer Cruise

On Oct. 24, the state Department of Motor Vehicles suspended its license for Cruise, ending the company's transportation of passengers without human drivers throughout San Francisco. According to the recall notice filed with federal regulators, the Cruise "inaccurately characterized the collision as a lateral collision," which led the vehicle to pull over out of traffic instead of remaining still. Wrapping up the meeting, Vogt and other executives tried to exude confidence that the company would bounce back. Now leading the company is General Motors General Counsel Craig Glidden, who is serving as co-president with Cruise Chief Technology Officer Mo Elshenawy. “It felt like we were not being told the full story when folks left, especially when Dan and Kyle left,” the former employee said.

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.

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.

The shut down came two days after California’s Department of Motor Vehicles said that the company “misrepresented” its technology and ordered Cruise to stop operating in the state. Elshenawy was listed as the author of the memo informing staff of the layoffs, which offered details about severance, benefits and career support. Laid-off Cruise employees are being offered at least 16 weeks of pay after their departures. Prior to the crash, the company also operated robotaxi services in Austin, Texas, and Phoenix, Arizona, and had plans to launch in Houston, Dallas, and Miami, among other cities. But GM isn’t ready to pull back completely from self-driving technology like some of its competitors.

California regulators said the company's vehicles posed "an unreasonable risk to public safety." And internal documents recently showed that Cruise apparently knew that its driverless cars had trouble correctly identifying children. Cruise co-founder and CEO Kyle Vogt told employees during an all-hands meeting Monday that layoffs were coming, sources who were on the call told TechCrunch. California’s Department of Motor Vehicles pulled Cruise’s operating permit, citing that the vehicles “are not safe for the public’s operation” and “misrepresentation” of the car’s technology. A few weeks later, Cruise paused all of its operations in other cities, including Austin, Houston, Dallas, Miami, and Phoenix. Affected employees were primarily in the company’s commercial operations division, as well as related corporate functions, a spokesperson said. The company stated layoffs for some workers before telling The Standard that it had made "the difficult decision to reduce a portion of the contingent workforce that supported driverless ride-hail operations."