Cruise robotaxis in crisis: layoffs, algorithm had blind spot for kids

Table Of Content

• Crisis At Cruise: Robotaxi CEO Confirms Coming Layoffs Amid Scramble To Rebuild Public Trust
• Police look for man they say assaulted a baby on a San Francisco bus
• Cruise Ends Stock Buybacks For Employees Amid Ongoing Safety Crisis
• Cruise, GM’s self-driving unit, lays off 8 percent of staff
• Media Services
• Around 150 people from recruiting, product, and design will lose their jobs

In GM's third-quarter earnings update, the company said it had lost roughly $1.9 billion on Cruise through September of this year. 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.

Crisis At Cruise: Robotaxi CEO Confirms Coming Layoffs Amid Scramble To Rebuild Public Trust

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.

Police look for man they say assaulted a baby on a San Francisco bus

“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. “We are committed to keeping our customers, regulators, and the public informed throughout this process,” she added. 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. A barrage of safety concerns and incidents have plagued Cruise, majority-owned by GM, since it received approval in August for round-the-clock robotaxi service in San Francisco. The company also said that all employees, regardless of whether they were laid off, will receive their January 15th vesting through its employee share-selling program.

Cruise Ends Stock Buybacks For Employees Amid Ongoing Safety Crisis

Today's top business headlines: Chobani buys La Colombe, Cruise layoffs, and Pope Francis' pitch for an AI treaty - Fast Company

Today's top business headlines: Chobani buys La Colombe, Cruise layoffs, and Pope Francis' pitch for an AI treaty.

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

The company will also conduct internal “listening sessions”, and explore building websites detailing collisions Cruise cars are involved in, Forbes said. Cruise is targeting non-engineering jobs in the layoffs, particularly those people who worked in the field, commercial operations and corporate staffing, according to the email. The company has also ended additional assignments of contingent workers who supported its driverless operations. Engineering, a category that makes up the bulk of the Cruise workforce, is largely being preserved, according to the content of the email and discussions with internal sources. Today, we are making staff reductions that will affect 24% of full-time Cruisers, through no fault of their own. We are simplifying and focusing our efforts to return with an exceptional service in one city to start with and focusing on the Bolt platform for this first step before we scale.

In October, the California Department of Motor Vehicles on Tuesday suspended Cruise's deployment and testing permits for its autonomous vehicles, effective immediately. Cruise executives said at the time they wanted to take a measured business approach that preserves cash and improves safety culture in an attempt to put GM’s troubled autonomous vehicle subsidiary on the right path. Cruise, the autonomous vehicle subsidiary of General Motors, told staff Thursday via email that the employee share-selling program for the fourth quarter is suspended, following an incident that resulted in the robotaxi company losing its permits to operate in California. Cruise cited the need to reevaluate how to offer competitive compensation, according to sources who spoke to TechCrunch on the condition of anonymity. 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.

According to a regulatory filing with state employment officials, Cruise laid off a total of 535 employees across the state, including 371 positions located in San Francisco. The majority of these—228 jobs—were centered at the company’s SoMa headquarters at 333 Brannan St., with 120 positions cut at Cruise’s 1201 Bryant St. office and 23 jobs at its servicing center at 640 Cesar Chavez St. 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. Other reports, based on Cruise's internal safety documents, showed that the car’s algorithms had trouble identifying children, something that Cruise employees knew about.

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. 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.

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

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. 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. Jon McNeill, a member of GM’s board, was also named vice chairman of the Cruise board.

The layoffs at Cruise may come as a surprise, though, given the company’s success at raising money. That has been pared back to relaunching its robotaxis in a single, yet-to-be-determined market. General Motors, which announced it would be cutting spending on the self-driving car company by “hundreds of millions of dollars,” has been in the process of clearing out much of Cruise’s leadership.

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. 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. The layoffs follow a series of missteps in recent months that culminated in the California Department of Motor Vehicles suspending the company’s driverless vehicle permit.

General Motors has absorbed huge losses during the development of the driverless service that was supposed to generate $1bn in revenue by 2025, with plans to expand beyond San Francisco. Also among the cuts, according to Bloomberg, was Prashanthi Raman, Cruise’s vice president of government affairs. Raman was featured in a promotional video last year where she rode around San Francisco in a Cruise robotaxi alongside former Mayor Willie Brown. Cruise has lost more than $8 billion since 2017, including $728 million in the third quarter of 2023, according to GM financial records.

This is very different from our prior plans to expand into more than a dozen new cities in 2024. 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. 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. It’s been a tumultuous seven years since GM first announced its plan to acquire Cruise with the goal of rapidly commercializing the technology. The company has scored some significant victories in recent months, including a vote in California to allow it to operate its driverless robotaxi service 24/7 — only to see most of that progress evaporate after a series of errors have exposed major problems with Cruise’s management.

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. A further 43 jobs were cut at the company’s Sunnyvale office and 18 jobs at its South San Francisco warehouse location. As part of their total compensation, Cruise employees would receive some cash salary and also would receive another portion as company stock.

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. GM, Cruise's parent company, then paused all Cruise robotaxi operations nationwide. General Motors voluntarily recalled Cruise’s entire fleet of 950 robotaxis, and yesterday, Cruise published a blog post in response to the recent events. Interestingly, the post said that the company is looking to hire a chief safety officer and is bringing on law firm Quinn Emmanuel, which has worked with Elon Musk, to review its response to the October pedestrian incident in San Francisco.