GM Chair and CEO Mary Barra reiterated Wednesday plans for Cruise to be more “deliberate” when operations eventually resume at the troubled self-driving vehicle subsidiary. For GM Cruise, that will include slashing spending “by hundreds of millions of dollars” in 2024, an action that is expected to result in widespread layoffs at the San Francisco-based company that employs about 3,800 people.
From an article in Tech Crunch by Kirsten Korosec.
Barra and CFO Paul Jacobson said Wednesday there would be more specific information in the coming weeks about what this new Cruise will look like following the outcome of two independent safety and incident reviews that are already underway.
“What Cruise accomplished over the past eight years since we acquired the company is remarkable,” Barra said during the Wednesday morning conference call. “Our priority now is to refocus them on safety, transparency and accountability and build trust with regulators at the local, state and federal levels, including first responders and the communities in which we will operate.”
Barra added that she expects “the pace of Cruise expansion to be more deliberate when operations resume and spending will be substantially lower in 2024 than it was in 2023.” Jacobson later added spending would be cut by hundreds of millions of dollars.
GM has invested billions of dollars in Cruise since it acquired the company in March 2016. Spending has ballooned in recent years in step with Cruise’s aggressive plans to launch in more than a dozen U.S. cities. The company burned through $732 million in the third quarter of 2023, according to GM’s last earnings report.
Barra’s comments come after weeks of disarray at Cruise following the California Department of Motor Vehicles’ October 24 decision to suspend the company’s permits to operate self-driving vehicles on public roads after an incident that saw a pedestrian — who had been initially hit by a human-driven car and landed in the path of a Cruise robotaxi — run over and dragged 20 feet by the AV. A video, which TechCrunch viewed a day after the incident, showed the robotaxi braking aggressively and coming to a stop over the woman. The DMV’s order of suspension stated that Cruise withheld about seven seconds of video footage, which showed the robotaxi then attempting to pull over and subsequently dragging the woman 20 feet.
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