GM's Cruise laying off 900, or 24% of its workforce: Read the memo

Table Of Content

• Support
• October 2023
• Cruise lays off nearly a quarter of its staff after grounding its robotaxi fleet
• Effective Tools to Enhance Employee Engagement and Retention
• Cruise robotaxis in crisis: Layoffs, recall, and algorithm found to have blind spot for kids
• Different Types of Compensation Plans & Benefits
• GM’s Cruise slashes more than 900 jobs after recalling robotaxis

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. After the incident, the California Department of Motor Vehicles suspended Cruise’s permit to operate driverless cars in the state. (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. 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."

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Cruise lays off contract workers following series of setbacks - KRON4

Cruise lays off contract workers following series of setbacks.

Posted: Thu, 09 Nov 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. In the note, Elshenawy said the company is drastically scaling back its expansion plans, pausing work on its Origin shuttle and slowing down its road map to “focus on delivering the improvements to our tech and vehicle performance that will build trust in our AVs." Cruise’s decision to suspend all trips on public roads last month came after a board meeting at the company’s headquarters.

October 2023

Also Cruise self-driving car production has been halted; hundreds of vehicles have been recalled; and local and federal government officials have launched their own investigations, among other concerns. GM Cruise workforce was about 3,800 before Thursday’s cuts, which also follow a round of Cruise layoffs of contractor last month. Affected employees will receive paychecks until Feb 12 and at least an additional eight weeks of pay, plus severance based on tenure. On Wednesday, as first reported by Reuters,, the company said it had parted with nine top executives, including leaders in legal, government affairs, commercial operations, and safety and systems, as part of a safety review triggered by the San Francisco crash. 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.

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

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. The DMV suspension came a week after federal auto safety regulators announced they were investigating Cruise following pedestrian injuries. The probe, spearheaded by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, was prompted by multiple reports involving pedestrian injuries and Cruise vehicles in recent months, and it concerns an estimated 594 self-driving Cruise vehicles, according to the filing. Barra reiterated plans for Cruise to be more “deliberate” when operations eventually resume at the troubled self-driving vehicle subsidiary. For GM, that includes slashing spending at Cruise “by hundreds of millions of dollars” in 2024, an action that most expected would result in widespread layoffs.

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. Vogt resigned as CEO last month, which was soon followed by the departure of his Cruise co-founder Daniel Kan.

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Long-term employees will get another two weeks of pay for every year at the company over three years, the letter said. "When there is an unreasonable risk to public safety, the DMV can immediately suspend or revoke permits," the California DMV said in a statement. "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.

Cruise robotaxis in crisis: Layoffs, recall, and algorithm found to have blind spot for kids

“We are committed to keeping our customers, regulators, and the public informed throughout this process,” she added. In a blog post published on Wednesday, the company also outlined some of the measures it plans to take, including hiring a Chief Safety Officer who will report to Vogt, and bringing in both a law firm and a third-party engineer firm to investigate the October 2 incident and its aftermath. But GM isn’t ready to pull back completely from self-driving technology like some of its competitors. In an interview in Washington, DC, yesterday, Barra said that fully driverless cars will scale faster than a lot of people think. Craig Glidden, the automaker’s executive vice president of legal and policy and a Cruise board member, will serve as a president and continue as chief administrative officer.

Cruise begins layoffs after pedestrian collision - Business Insider

Cruise begins layoffs after pedestrian collision.

Posted: Fri, 10 Nov 2023 08:00:00 GMT [source]

Earlier this week, Cruise announced that nine top executives were being fired amid a probe into the company’s safety practices, including its chief operating officer and chief legal officer. On Wednesday, Cruise fired nine executives, including its chief operating officer and chief legal and policy officer amid an external investigation led by law firm Quinn Emmanuel into the accident and Cruise’s response. 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. 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. We are ceasing work on the Origin MY24 but not losing sight of our work on future programs.

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

Videos of Cruise robotaxis blocking traffic and driving into a construction site were shared on social media. But it was a crash with an emergency response vehicle that began to chip away at the company’s seemingly impenetrable exterior. Cruise, General Motors’ self-driving development subsidiary, will lay off almost a quarter of its workforce—about 900 employees—the company announced Thursday. 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. "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.

The GM Cruise layoffs, which primarily affected commercial operations and related corporate functions, are the latest turmoil for the robotaxi startup. This come one day after Cruise dismissed nine “key leaders” for the company’s response to an Oct 2 accident in which a pedestrian was dragged 20 feet by a Cruise self-driving car after being struck by another vehicle. The subsidiary announced the cuts on Thursday in a letter to Cruise’s 3,800 workers from its president and chief technical officer, Mo ElShenawy, who wrote that the layoffs were not the fault of the workers. The job cuts come a day after Cruise confirmed that nine key leaders are no longer with the company amid an ongoing investigation into an October crash involving one of its driverless robotaxis that forced it to suspend operations. 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.

The company’s next few weeks will be critical in determining if and how the General Motors subsidiary will move forward in a developing market with rivals like Waymo, a subsidiary of Alphabet. Over the past four years, Cruise has brought in a modicum of revenue, leading to collective losses of about $6 billion. “As we build a better Cruise, we’re evaluating a variety of potential actions to ensure we operate at the highest standards of safety, transparency and accountability,” Cruise spokesperson Navideh Forghani said in a statement.

Jon McNeill, who joined the Cruise board last month, has been appointed vice chairman of the board, serving alongside GM CEO Mary Barra. Waymo, a division of Google’s parent company Alphabet, is still offering a driverless taxi service in San Francisco. The industry’s leaders consider the city to be a critical proving ground for the technology’s potential and the viability of the $8 trillion market that it could create. But many driverless car executives now worry that Cruise’s troubles could lead regulators to increase their enforcement and scrutiny of the nascent technology.

The layoffs come just a day after nine senior leaders (SLT) at Cruise, who worked in its commercial operations, legal and policy departments, were dismissed by the company’s board. COO Gil West and David Estrada, who was head of government affairs, were among that group. 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. 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 contractors were hit with layoffs after the self-driving car company had its permit revoked in California and subsequently suspended all of its driverless robotaxi operations nationwide.

This week, Cruise leadership tried to rally their employees and regroup after numerous obstacles and setbacks in recent weeks. Our message to other employers in the market is that each departing Cruiser is a talented, driven, and mission-focused team member who will contribute and achieve great things elsewhere. Other companies will be privileged to have these professionals on their teams, as we were privileged to have them here during their time at Cruise. Many of you will be impacted because we aren't commercializing as quickly, and therefore don't need support in certain cities or facilities.