Table Of Content
We have also ended additional assignments of contingent workers who support our driverless operations, as we refined our go forward plans. In October, the California Department of Motor Vehicles suspended Cruise's deployment and testing permits for its autonomous vehicles, alongside a statement that said, "When there is an unreasonable risk to public safety, the DMV can immediately suspend or revoke permits." Workers will remain on the payroll through February 12 and will be eligible for an additional eight weeks of pay, with long-term employees offered an additional two weeks’ pay per every year at Cruise over three years, according to the email to staff. Anyone laid off will also receive their 2023 bonus (eligible target payout) on January 5, 2024.
Billionaire Telegram CEO says he was attacked in SF after 2014 Jack Dorsey meeting
“The 24% or so was a surprise in terms of the numbers that we saw coming out,” the laid-off employee said. The employee said they realized they were among the positions affected when Slack access was shut off Thursday morning. Cruise confirmed that the RLO has ended but declined to answer questions about what that means for employees. General Motors has lost some $8 billion on Cruise since 2017, according to financial filings, and this year has spent at least $1.9 billion on the company. Last month, GM said it would cut the subsidiary’s funding by “hundreds of millions” of dollars in 2024.
Is SoundHound AI Stock a Bargain After the 50% Crash? The Pros and Cons.
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.
GM's Cruise laying off 900 employees, or 24% of its workforce: Read the memo here
"Cruise has made the difficult decision to reduce a portion of the contingent workforce that supported driverless ridehail operations," a company spokesperson told CNBC in a statement. "These contingent workers were responsible for work such as cleaning, charging and maintaining the fleet, and we're grateful for their contributions." 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. The company got the go-ahead to expand its driverless ride services in San Francisco back in August then cut back its operations by 50% barely more than a week later after several incidents involving its vehicles. In October, Cruise lost its permit in California entirely after an incident in which a pedestrian was dragged beneath one of its driverless vehicles 20 feet after it ran her over after she was first struck by a different car. "Cruise has made the difficult decision to reduce a portion of the contingent workforce that supported driverless ridehail operations," a Cruise spokesperson told Insider.
Struggling Cruise Cuts About 25 Percent of Its Workers
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.
Many of you will be impacted because we aren't commercializing as quickly, and therefore don't need support in certain cities or facilities. We didn't take any of these decisions lightly, though I know that isn't much of a consolation if you're someone affected by the actions we are taking today. Proposed initiatives to address this include a website that would allow people to easily report unexpected behavior by Cruise cars to the company. John Krafcik, the former CEO of Waymo, Cruise’s primary rival, who stepped down from that position two years ago, told Forbes in an email that Cruise and GM should have undertaken a more measured approach to public safety during its rollout to get it right the first time. During the November 6 call, Vogt acknowledged that his suggestion that layoffs might be coming in the previous week’s all-hands had been “extremely stressful” for employees.
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.
Media Services
The workers, contracted through third-party vendors or staffing agencies, also fielded questions from riders about items left behind in vehicles. General Motors' Cruise on Thursday announced internally that it will lay off 900 employees, or 24% of its workforce, the company confirmed to CNBC. Along with the strategy shift, the company is now considering “inviting external safety reviewers including the strongest AV safety critics to review our safety strategy and practices,” said Louise Zhang, Cruise’s vice president for safety and systems, who spoke during the meeting. She did not elaborate on who these reviewers might be, or the sort of access they would be given to Cruise’s internal processes.
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.
GM's Cruise laying off 900 employees, or 24% of its workforce: Read the memo here - CNBC
GM's Cruise laying off 900 employees, or 24% of its workforce: Read the memo here.
Posted: Thu, 14 Dec 2023 08:00:00 GMT [source]
(It had vehicles in Arizona, Texas, and Florida as well.) In response to the pause in operations, GM said it would reduce spending on Cruise and appoint its own executives to oversee the company. GM and the Cruise board have been scrambling ever since the October 2 incident put the company in the crosshairs of state, local and federal agencies. However, Cruise’s robotaxi operations in San Francisco had been criticized by the public and city officials almost immediately after the California Public Utilities Commission issued the company in August the final permit required to operate commercially. Videos of Cruise robotaxis blocking traffic and driving into a construction site were shared on social media.
The cuts are part of a broader restructuring to focus the robotaxi unit on a narrower path to commercialization. Instead of expanding its commercial robotaxi service to multiple US cities, the company will relaunch its currently paused service in just one. Inside the company, employees say morale is flagging amid withering public scrutiny and now executive warnings about job cuts. During the hour-long meeting, executives outlined damage control operations ranging from internal “listening sessions” to proposed public-facing websites that would detail collisions involving Cruise cars or allow people to post comments describing their interactions with the vehicles. And a humbled CEO Kyle Vogt confirmed to employees that the company will need to do layoffs.
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."
Cruise’s announcement Thursday that it would cut around a quarter of its staff came at the tail-end of months of chaos and what a laid-off employee characterized as an internal lack of transparency at the company that helped sow distrust internally. Cruise’s board of directors held a regularly-scheduled meeting at the company’s San Francisco headquarters this past Monday. Following that meeting, the company put out a series of announcements indicating that it would “further steps to enhance safety and transparency,” including hiring a new executive and expanding its outside investigation into the circumstances of its fateful October 2 incident.
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.
The sacking of around 900 employees is the latest blow to the General Motors-owned company still reeling from the impact of an Oct. 2 incident in San Francisco, where a Cruise vehicle struck and dragged a woman nearly 20 feet after she was first hit by a human-driven vehicle. 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. A day after word of job cuts spread at Cruise, the autonomous vehicle robotaxi company announced it is laying off contractors who worked on its ride-hailing services. 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 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.
The robotaxi initiated its brakes and came to a stop with the pedestrian under the vehicle. That final decision by the robotaxi to attempt to pull over was part of the reason the agencies decided to suspend the permit. The company laid off Thursday contingent workers, people who were employed to support its driverless fleet.
No comments:
Post a Comment