General Motors is laying off roughly half the employees who remain at Cruise, its scuttled robotaxi arm.
The move comes two months after General Motors said it would retreat from the robotaxi business and stop sinking money into its San Francisco-based Cruise autonomous vehicle unit. GM has spent more than $10 billion on Cruise since acquiring the business in 2016.
“As a result of the change in strategy we announced in December, today we will part with nearly 50% of our Cruise employee base, through a reduction in force,” Craig Glidden, Cruise’s president and chief administrative officer, announced via a companywide email viewed and verified by TechCrunch.
Cruise had nearly 2,300 employees as of the end of last year.
“With our move away from the ride-hail business and toward providing autonomous vehicles to customers alongside GM, our staffing and resource needs have dramatically changed,” Glidden wrote in the email.
A group of top executives is leaving the company this week, including CEO Marc Whitten, chief human resources officer Nilka Thomas, chief safety officer Steve Kenner and chief government affairs officer Rob Grant. Mo Elshenawy, president and chief technology officer, will stay on through April to help with the transition, Glidden added.
GM said in a separate press release that Cruise is now a fully owned subsidiary. The Detroit automaker will focus on developing partially automated driver-assist systems like Super Cruise, which allows drivers to take their hands off the steering wheel.
GM said in December it would cease funding robotaxis, “given the considerable time and resources that would be needed to scale the business, along with an increasingly competitive robotaxi market.”
Cruise had a tumultuous run in San Francisco. A little more than a year after one of its robotaxis dragged a woman along a downtown street in October 2023, the company dodged a criminal charge by admitting that it lied to federal regulators about what happened.
Cruise co-founder Kyle Vogt, now CEO of the Bot Company, weighed in on the automaker’s decision to end its robotaxi business in December. “In case it was unclear before, it is clear now: GM are a bunch of dummies,” Vogt posted on X.
The robotaxis, with cute names like Kombucha, also made headlines as a novel place to have sex.