A robot car of the General Motors subsidiary Cruise is on a test drive.
Andrej Sokolow | picture alliance | Getty Images
General Motors is laying off roughly half of the employees who remain at its discontinued Cruise robotaxi business.
The plans come two months after GM said it would no longer fund Cruise after spending more than $10 billion since acquiring the self-driving car business in 2016.
“Today, Cruise shared the difficult decision to part ways with approximately 50% of its workforce,” Cruise said in an emailed statement. “We are grateful for their passion and contributions to help us reach this stage, and our focus is on supporting them into their next chapter with severance packages and career support.”
Cruise had nearly 2,300 employees as of the end of last year, a GM spokesman previously told CNBC.
In an internal email sent Tuesday morning to all Cruise employees, which was viewed by CNBC, Cruise President and Chief Administrative Officer Craig Glidden wrote that the 50% reduction came “as a result of the change in strategy we announced in December.”
“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.
He added that a string of executives will also depart this week: Marc Whitten, CEO; Nika Thomas, chief human resources officer; Steve Kenner, chief safety officer; and Rob Grant, chief government affairs officer. Mo Elshenawy, president and chief technology officer, will stay on at Cruise through the end of April to help with transition duties, Glidden wrote.
The Cruise layoffs, which were first reported by TechCrunch, were expected, however executives previously declined to speculate on the amount.
The job cuts were announced in conjunction with the Detroit automaker reporting the completion of Cruise becoming a wholly-owned subsidiary within GM, which is now focusing on “personal autonomous vehicles” rather than robotaxis.
About 88% of remaining employees are in engineering or related roles, and impacted employees were given 60 days’ notice, according to the company.
During the remainder of their time with Cruise, the affected employees will receive full base pay, as well as eight weeks’ severance. Employees who had been with Cruise for more than three years will receive an additional two weeks’ pay for every additional year spent at Cruise, the company said.
“While not an easy decision, we are focused on combining efforts with General Motors to accelerate autonomy at scale on personal autonomous vehicles,” Cruise said.
GM’s Cruise was considered a leader in the business along with Alphabet-backed Waymo until the company grounded its robotaxi fleet and announced the end of its commercial operations late last year. That came after a October 2023 accident in which external probes found the company misled or deceived regulators about the incident.
In January 2024, a third-party probe into Cruise revealed that culture issues, ineptitude and poor leadership were at the center of regulatory oversights and coverup concerns that had plagued the company.
The report addressed, in part, controversy that had swirled around Cruise since an Oct. 2, 2023, accident in which a pedestrian in San Francisco was dragged 20 feet by a Cruise robotaxi after being struck by a separate vehicle. Results of the investigation, which reviewed whether Cruise representatives misled investigators or members of the media in discussing the incident, were published months later in a 105-page report.
