GM Cruise Employees and Employees: The Impact of Staff Layoffs on Safety and Performance, and Benefits for the Bolt Platform

The self-driving unit of GM, Cruise will lay off almost a quarter of its employees because of the accident in which a hit-and-run victim was pinned under a vehicle and dragged for 20 feet.

The company’s top executives, including co-founding leader and CEO Kyle Vogt and chief product officer Dan Kan, have left. Nine more executives were fired yesterday, including the chief legal and policy officer and senior vice president of government affairs.

Following the resignation of Vogt, Mo Elshenawy, the company’s VP for engineering, was promoted to president and chief technology officer. In a memo to employees today, Elshenawy struck a sober tone.

Today, we are making staff reductions that will affect 24% of full-time Cruisers, through no fault of their own. We are simplifying and focusing our efforts to return with an exceptional service in one city to start with and focusing on the Bolt platform for this first step before we scale. We are decreasing our employee count in operations and other areas. Although some Tech positions are impacted, the impacts are largely outside of engineering. We decided to part ways with several members of the SLT, as you might know.

The affected employees were mainly in the commercial operations division, as well as related corporate functions. She added that the company’s top priority was to “do right” by these departing workers.

If you were laid off you will be able to get eight weeks of pay after February 12th. Long-term employees are being offered an additional two weeks’ pay per every year at Cruise over three years. Everyone will receive an end-of-the-year bonus, as well as extended medical and dental coverage, immigration support, and other benefits. On the Cruise website is the full memo posted.

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.

GM is also putting its own people in place to keep a closer eye on Cruise. TheCruise board member will continue to be the company’s chief administrative officer while he serves as a president. Jon McNeill, who joined the Cruise board last month, has been appointed vice chairman of the board, serving alongside GM CEO Mary Barra.

GM has lost $8.2 billion on Cruise since 2017 but expects to lose much less going forward. In a recent call with investors, he said that the cash reductions would probably amount to hundreds of millions of dollars.

Some of the competitors like to pull back completely from self-driving technology. In an interview yesterday in Washington, DC, Barra said that a lot of people think that fully autonomously-driven cars won’t scale fast.

She said one of the challenges they faced was not working with the regulators to understand the technology and be transparent. “But the technology had already been evaluated by a third party to say it’s already safer than a human driver.”

Days later Cruise halted autonomous vehicle testing and operations US-wide. The company operated in Austin, Texas and Phoenix, Arizona and were planning to launch in Houston, Dallas and Miami before the crash.