Cruise cuts nearly half of staff as GM focuses on consumer AVs

When Cruise was most successful, it was running services in three cities, and it planned to expand to a dozen more in 2024. | Source: Cruise

Yesterday, Cruise LLC began laying off more employees, the company confirmed to The Robot Report. The layoffs will reach nearly half of its workforce, which could affect more than 1,000 people. 

These recent layoffs likely aren’t surprising to Cruise employees. In December, General Motors Co., Cruise’s parent company, said it would no longer fund the startup’s robotaxi deployment.

Instead, GM is combining the Cruise and GM technical teams into a single effort to focus on Super Cruise, GM’s hands-free driver assistance system. The automaker is apparently betting on personal autonomous vehicles instead of robotaxis. 

Cruise’s most recent layoffs extend to the CEO and several other top executives, according to TechCrunch. Big names among those laid off included:

• Marc Whitten, CEO
• Nilka Thomas, chief human resources officer
• Steve Kenner chief safety officer
• Rob Grant, global head of public policy

Meanwhile, its Mo Elshenawy, chief technologist at Cruise, will stay on through the end of April to aid the transition. 

Craig Glidden, Cruise’s president and chief administrative officer, announced the layoffs to employees via email. Thomas notified individuals affected by the layoffs in a separate email. 

“Today, Cruise shared the difficult decision to part ways with approximately 50% of its workforce. 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. While not an easy decision, we are focused on combining efforts with General Motors to accelerate autonomy at scale on personal autonomous vehicles,” a Cruise spokesperson told The Robot Report. 

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GM prioritizes keeping engineers 

Cruise told The Robot Report that around 88% of the retained employees work in engineering or related functions. The company said this reflects GM’s continued investment in technical expertise. 

“By combining the specialized technology and talent at Cruise with our team developing Super Cruise, we’ll have the ability to accelerate our work on both assisted driving and autonomous driving,” said Dave Richardson, senior vice president of software and services engineering at GM. “We look forward to teaming with Cruise to accelerate our work together.”

In addition, following applicable law, Cruise provided employees with 60 days’ notice of their termination. During this time, Cruise will give laid-off employees their full base pay and their 2024 performance year bonus at target.

The severance offering includes eight weeks of pay, with long-term employees offered an additional two weeks’ pay per every full year at Cruise over three years. It also benefits, three months of company-paid COBRA coverage, and LinkedIn Premium subscriptions for a year to support their job searches. This is comparable to the package that Cruise offered in 2023.

As Cruise changes direction, Waymo the last robotaxi standing

Cruise has been facing troubles for a few years now. Its 2023 road bumps culminated in the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) suspending its permits in the state. Last year, the company made efforts to re-launch its service, but they were not enough. GM cited long development times, high costs, and an increasingly competitive market as the reasons behind its decision. 

Waymo LLC, the self-driving unit of Alphabet Inc., hasn’t slowed down in the meantime. In 2024, it launched its first service in Los Angeles and expanded services in San Francisco and Phoenix. The company already said it provides over 150,000 per week across its deployments. 

Already this year, Waymo has announced expansions, marking its leadership in the U.S. At the end of January, it gave its first fully autonomous rides to employees in Atlanta. This is the first step toward a public deployment the company has planned for later this year with the help of Uber Technologies Inc. Waymo is also planning to begin testing its robotaxi service in Miami in 2025. 

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