It’s been a long, bumpy road for Cruise, a General Motors-run company tasked with taking on major players like Waymo in the self-driving shuttle ring. The division is shutting down, and management reportedly shared the news with employees via workplace communication system Slack.
Speaking to TechCrunch, Cruise employees who asked to remain anonymous said they learned their days at the California-owned company were numbered after CEO Marc Whitten broke the news in a Slack messaging channel used for corporate announcements. Executives later called what’s described as a short “all-hands” meeting to provide additional information, according to the website, but it sounds like details about what’s next for the people who work at Cruise remain unclear. Employees said that they were “surprised” and “blindsided” by the announcement.
For its part, GM explained that it wants to “realign its autonomous driving strategy and prioritize development of advanced driver assistance systems on a path to fully autonomous personal vehicles.” It supposedly intends to combine Cruise, which it owns about 90% of, with its various technical teams.
Cruise’s demise isn’t surprising; the firm has gone from setback to setback in the past couple of years. California banned Cruise from testing its autonomous, Chevrolet Bolt-based prototypes on public roads in October 2023 after officials discovered that the company “withheld footage of one of its cars dragging away an injured pedestrian after they were knocked into its path during a hit-and-run.” Other incidents involving Cruise cars were reported as well, including traffic jams and fender-benders. Cruise remained allowed to test prototypes with human supervision.
Kyle Vogt, one of Cruise’s two founders and later its CEO, left the company in November 2023 after reports claimed engineers knew that the prototypes struggled to detect children, yet management nonetheless chose to test them on public roads. Cruise was allowed to resume testing autonomous shuttles on California roads after paying a $112,500 settlement in June 2024, and it signed a multi-year partnership with Uber in October.
These various setbacks cost a substantial amount of money. That might not be a huge problem if Cruise posted massive profits, but that’s not the case. The robotaxis that we were told would take over the world continue to exist in a microcosm, and they’ll be stuck there until regulations get looser and technology becomes both better and cheaper. All is not lost, though: GM says it will leverage some of the technology developed by Cruise to design a self-driving system that can be installed in a regular-production car (put another way: one you can buy rather than ride in). That’s good news for many of Cruise’s engineers, who might get to keep their jobs. Let’s hope that the rest aren’t handed more bad news via Slack.
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