According to reports, the layoffs involve 900 employees, mainly from commercial operations and related corporate functions. At the same time, Cruise also said that this time it ended the work of some “temporary workers supporting our self-driving business.”

For comparison, Cruise had 3,800 employees before the layoffs were announced. Cruise said, “This reflects our new future and more measured path to market, which means we reduce the immediate need for field, commercial operations and corporate personnel.”

▲ Picture source Cruise

A GM spokesman said, “GM will support Cruise in making the difficult decision that reflects their ‘safety as their North Star’ and more thoughtful path forward. We have full confidence in this team, which operates with trust, accountability and accountability.” and transparency, laying the foundation for the company’s long-term success. We are committed to supporting Cruise.”

It was previously reported that in October this year, a Curise taxi caused a traffic accident. The taxi dragged a pedestrian and dragged him 20 feet (6 meters). After that, California banned the taxi. The company’s self-driving vehicles drive on the road. Soon thereafter, Cruise ceased all testing operations in the United States.

Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt announced his resignation last month. Additionally, the company fired nine executives this week, including its chief operating officer.

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In an email to employees, CEO Kyle Vogt also said the company would make a new takeover bid that would allow employees to sell stock (two days after Cruise withdrew its previous takeover bid).

“I am sorry that we have veered off course under my leadership, and this has profound consequences for Cruise,” Vogt wrote in an email.

“As CEO, I take responsibility for the situation Cruise is currently in. There are no excuses or sugarcoating what happened. We need to redouble our efforts on safety, transparency and community engagement.”

Vogt also noted that the way the company works with regulators, the media and the public “must improve.”

Attached the incident detail:

 In August this year, ten Cruise Robotaxi vehicles suddenly stalled on the road, causing a traffic jam. A few days later, a Robotaxi crashed into a road construction area and got stuck in the wet concrete; another Robotaxi hit a fire truck at an intersection, causing its passengers to be sent to the hospital.

 The California Department of Motor Vehicles announced on October 25 that Cruise's self-driving cars pose an "unreasonable risk" to public safety and "fail to meet standards for on-road operations."

 Cruise has suspended all public operations of its self-driving cars and will issue a recall for 950 vehicles.

 Cruise is facing multiple federal investigations into the safety of its vehicles, including two cases in which its self-driving cars failed to yield to pedestrians on sidewalks.

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Since June, the company has been operating a completely driverless commercial robo-taxi service in San Francisco, where being completely driverless means no safety operator behind the wheel. Last month, Cruise announced plans to add Austin, Texas, and Phoenix, Arizona, to its own service.

During GM’s third-quarter earnings call, Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt said the company remains on track to complete its first commercial driverless public ride-hailing and delivery service by the end of this year.

Earlier this year, Cruise debuted a waiting list to join the Cruise Rider Community in San Francisco and promised free rides initially. Previously, the company had said that the first rides in Austin and Phoenix would likely be free and that it intended to begin charging for the service soon, but a spokesperson told the media today that Cruise will immediately launch a fully driverless, paid service.

Cruise plans to start on a limited scale and gradually scale up as the company produces more vehicles – specifically Cruise Origin, a vehicle that will be used for the first time in the future, according to Vogt, who began supervised testing of more than a dozen vehicles in Austin last month and noted that Cruise’s mapping system is “as expected. – Cruise Origin, in particular, is a purpose-built self-driving car that Cruise will rely on to achieve its exponential scale and robot cab dominance in the United States.

Interestingly, as part of a waitlist questionnaire, Cruise asked passengers what time of day they would be most likely to use the service: morning, afternoon, evening or late at night. In San Francisco, Cruise only operates from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m., largely due to California regulations, and Cruise’s main competitor, Waymo, has been offering commercial robo-taxi services outside of Phoenix since 2020, and the company operates 24/7. Cruise may not have to operate only at night when it’s in Arizona.

Cruise said it will share more updates on the service’s hours of operation in the near future.

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The letter also states that employees generally believe this company is not ready to launch to the public, but there is a fear of admitting this due to leadership and investor expectations. Cruise responded to this – “safety is the top priority here” – with the results of a survey of more than 2,000 employees conducted by this company in April 2022, with 94 percent of those surveyed agreeing with this statement.

The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), which is responsible for issuing permits for driverless cars in California, said it is looking into the issues raised by the letter.

The CPUC reportedly issued a driverless deployment permit to Cruise in early June, which will allow the General Motors-owned company to begin charging for self-driving cab service in San Francisco. Cruise began commercial operations roughly three weeks ago.

Under the CPUC’s resolution giving Cruise the green light, the commission has the authority to suspend or revoke a permit for self-driving cars at any time if it finds that unsafe practices become apparent.

Cruise said its relationship with regulators is transparent and that communication between the two is frequent and consistent. The company also said it strictly complies with various reporting requirements and provides additional information to the CPUC as needed.

The employee’s concerns were originally brought to the CPUC in May, just weeks after a fleet of Cruise vehicles stopped on a San Francisco street for nearly two hours, blocking traffic and an intersection. cruise did not say what caused the problem, but the vehicles need to be recovered through a combination of remote assistance and manual retrieval.

“Currently (as of May 2022) there are frequent incidents of vehicles from our San Francisco fleet entering a ‘VRE’ or vehicle retrieval, either individually or in clusters. When this occurs, vehicles are stranded, often blocking traffic in the lane and potentially blocking emergency vehicles. Sometimes it is possible to remotely assist a vehicle to pull over safely, but there are also situations where the fallback system also fails and vehicles cannot be remotely maneuvered out of the lane they are blocking until they are physically towed to a facility,,” wrote the employee, who identified himself as a father and a safety-critical systems employee who has worked at Cruise for many years.

In addition, he reveals a potentially “chaotic environment” within Cruise, particularly around the company’s internal security reporting system, which Cruise employees use to report any type of concerns they have about security. The author of the letter claims he had submitted a security issue, but six months later, the ticket was still active, meaning the company’s risk assessment of the issue itself had not been completed.

That means the note will remain in triage indefinitely, he said, in part because Cruise has no required turnaround time for such notes.

“I don’t know if my experience with our security reporting system is representative of most situations, but I believe it is at least indicative of a very chaotic environment that allows this sort of thing to happen.”

The letter also noted that Cruise did not prioritize the recording of core system functions and that the company intentionally withheld the results of investigations into crashes and other sensitive, potentially damaging matters involving Cruise vehicles from most employees.

In June, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration conducted a special investigation into a crash involving a Cruise vehicle in San Francisco that was known to have caused minor injuries.

“As an employee working on safety-critical systems, the only reason I can think of for withholding this type of information from employees like myself is for optics and damage control purposes, which I believe is inconsistent with a safety-first culture,” the self-described employee wrote.

Right now, TechCrunch cannot confirm whether the author of the letter is actually a Cruise employee. Emails sent to the email address provided in the letter went unanswered, and the CPUC hasn’t told TechCrunch whether the agency itself was able to verify his employment.

Cruise spokesman Drew Pusateri told TechCrunch, “Our security record is tracked, reported and published by multiple government agencies. We’re proud of that, and that speaks for itself.”

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