Cruise Ends Stock Buybacks For Employees Amid Ongoing Safety Crisis

Table Of Content

• Cruise lays off nearly a quarter of its staff after grounding its robotaxi fleet
• Police look for man they say assaulted a baby on a San Francisco bus
• Cruise ship companies are still paying for COVID interrupting their business
• Nancy Tung, a career prosecutor, elected as San Francisco Democratic Party chair
• Cruise robotaxis in crisis: Layoffs, recall, and algorithm found to have blind spot for kids
• The total beginner’s guide: Scoring shrooms in San Francisco, 7 different ways
• GM’s Cruise slashes more than 900 jobs after recalling robotaxis

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. 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. The employee share program involves GM buying back vested equity on a quarterly basis to facilitate recurring liquidity. The shares were historically bought based on valuation, but Cruise’s valuation has changed since an October 2 incident that left a pedestrian stuck under and dragged by a Cruise robotaxi.

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

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. 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.

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

Cruise CEO Confirms Coming Layoffs Amid Scramble To Rebuild Public Trust - Forbes

Cruise CEO Confirms Coming Layoffs Amid Scramble To Rebuild Public Trust.

Posted: Wed, 08 Nov 2023 08:00:00 GMT [source]

On Thursday, Cruise abruptly ended a program allowing employees and alumni to sell company stock back to its corporate parent, General Motors. Both current and former workers were informed in a company-wide email sent around 9 a.m. Cruise employees still hold shares in the company, but since these are not publicly traded they can only be sold if GM schedules a liquidity event, which has traditionally occurred every quarter. A third party evaluates and sets a valuation for the shares before there is a tender offer. 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.

Cruise ship companies are still paying for COVID interrupting their business

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. After losing its permits in California, pausing all operations (driverless and manual) across the country, and pausing production on the purpose-built Origin robotaxi, layoffs are imminent. 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.

Since purchasing Cruise in 2016 for $1 billion, General Motors has been hemorrhaging money. From January to September, GM lost $1.9 billion on Cruise expenses between January and September this year, in addition to a $732 million loss in the third quarter. GM’s driverless car subsidiary has announced a round of layoffs this week, with the CEO Kyle Vogt reportedly telling employees in an all-hands meeting. Plus, investigations have dredged up some incriminating news that the software’s algorithm had trouble detecting children. 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.

Key leaders depart GM's Cruise, layoffs announced amid investigation into SF incident - CBS News

Key leaders depart GM's Cruise, layoffs announced amid investigation into SF incident.

Posted: Thu, 14 Dec 2023 08:00:00 GMT [source]

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

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 discontinuation of Cruise’s RLO program comes amid an ongoing crisis at the company. Earlier this month, according to audio leaked to Forbes from an all-hands meeting, CEO Kyle Vogt confirmed that staff layoffs were coming.

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. "When there is an unreasonable risk to public safety, the DMV can immediately suspend or revoke permits," the California DMV said in a statement. 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. General Motors' Cruise on Thursday announced internally that it will lay off 900 employees, or 24% of its workforce, the company confirmed to CNBC.

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. 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. 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.

This week, Cruise leadership tried to rally their employees and regroup after numerous obstacles and setbacks in recent weeks. Cruise did not respond to Insider's request for comment on the potential layoffs of full time employees. What's nextAs mentioned, in a few moments, you will receive an email letting you know whether or not you are affected by this staffing reduction, and if you are impacted, you will get details about what happens next.

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. 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. Cruise had idled its fleet of self-driving cars in San Francisco last March at the start of the government-imposed lockdown. Since then, the company has brought a small number of vehicles out of hibernation to do food delivery work for two Bay Area food banks.

These positions spanned departments including software development, marketing, recruiting, accounting and operations. The loss to employees is highly dependent on when they started and what the stock price was at that time. Sources we spoke to indicated they would be losing upwards of tens of thousands of dollars. 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.

But it was a crash with an emergency response vehicle that began to chip away at the company’s seemingly impenetrable exterior. 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.