GMs Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt resigns from company

Table Of Content

• More from this stream Friday news dumps: all the news companies hoped you wouldn’t notice
• Cruise’s C.E.O. Quits as the Driverless Carmaker Aims to Rebuild Trust
• Tesla pauses German production after Red Sea shipping attacks
• A Cruise car hit a pedestrian. The company’s response could set back California’s new robotaxi industry
• Photos: Los Angeles Times Festival of Books
• Self-driving car users could watch films on motorway under new DfT proposals
• This is after General Motors' recent installation of a Chief Administrative Officer.
• GM’s big bet on driverless cars turns sour

Barra reportedly told employees that GM general counsel Craig Glidden will serve as Cruise’s co-president alongside Mo Elshenawy, who will also become chief technology officer. Former Tesla president Jon McNeill, who’s been a board member at GM for several years, was named vice chairman of the Cruise board alongside Barra. GM CEO Mary Barra would routinely invite him to appear on earnings calls or to speak at investor conferences in a sign that the automaker was fully invested in Cruise. Barra herself went onstage at CES in 2022 and declared that GM would sell fully autonomous vehicles, powered by Cruise’s technology, to regular people by mid-decade.

More from this stream Friday news dumps: all the news companies hoped you wouldn’t notice

Initially, the pair had focused on kits that could retrofit a vehicle and turn it into a self-driving car. GM took interest and acquired the company in March 2016 in a deal of cash and stock valued at more than $1 billion. Kyle Vogt, a founder and chief executive of Cruise, the driverless car subsidiary of General Motors, resigned on Sunday, less than a month after Cruise suspended all autonomous operations after a series of traffic mishaps. Cruise’s vice president of engineering, Mo Elshenawy, will step in as the company’s president and CTO, spokesperson Aaron McLear said in a written statement. Craig Glidden, GM’s executive vice president of legal and policy, who was appointed last week as Cruise’s chief administrative officer, will also serve as the unit’s president.

Cruise’s C.E.O. Quits as the Driverless Carmaker Aims to Rebuild Trust

Ammann, a former investment banker, began leading Cruise in 2019 after serving as GM's president and chief financial officer before that. "I suspect at least one more high level exec will have to resign — anyone who made the call to obfuscate or omit information in communication with the California DMV," he said. "In my opinion, Cruise has been too slow in taking steps to rebuild trust with staff, regulators and the public. Executive departures are table stakes."

Tesla pauses German production after Red Sea shipping attacks

Without commercial permits to operate in San Francisco and an internal decision to pause its driverless fleets in other states, the company laid off contract workers, further deepening the malaise. The CEO of General Motors’ self-driving vehicle company Cruise has announced his resignation just weeks after the company shuttered operations of its fleet to review safety procedures. The resignation is a stunning fall from prominence for one of the tech industry’s most outspoken champions of self-driving cars.

Cruise's Kyle Vogt resigns as CEO of the robotaxi company - Yahoo Movies Canada

Cruise's Kyle Vogt resigns as CEO of the robotaxi company.

Posted: Sun, 21 Apr 2024 18:23:35 GMT [source]

Even so, Cruise’s problems are a lesson for the industry and for society. In fact, it offers a guarantee, because if the companies can’t demonstrate that they are a fair bit safer than human drivers, they will get shut down, and permanently. The company subsequently paused driverless operations nationwide, appointed a new chief safety officer, recalled all 950 of its vehicles, and retained an outside group to perform an independent safety audit.

Photos: Los Angeles Times Festival of Books

The GM subsidiary also promised to hire a chief safety officer—who was supposed to report directly to Vogt—and said it bolstered its software to prevent cars from dragging people after a collision. A little more than a month later, Cruise went a step further by voluntarily halting not just driverless cars but its entire fleet—with or without a human behind the wheel—throughout the U.S. Vogt's similarly sudden exit from Cruise comes less than a week after the company pulled its entire fleet off public roads in the U.S. to conduct a safety review after one of its robotaxis dragged a pedestrian in San Francisco.

The department had to walk that back when video recordings showed this rather nasty accusation to be false. Both Waymo and Cruise have to be thankful for their video records which have also shown the reality of situations where accusers had poor perception, or possibly were slandering. Hard as it is, in the end we should pay attention to statistics, and Cruise has good statistics. In the intervening period, a number of damaging leaks and revelations have come out of the company.

Vogt resigns as CEO of Cruise following safety questions, recalls of self-driving vehicles - The Associated Press

Vogt resigns as CEO of Cruise following safety questions, recalls of self-driving vehicles.

Posted: Sun, 19 Nov 2023 08:00:00 GMT [source]

This is after General Motors' recent installation of a Chief Administrative Officer.

Mo Elshenawy, Cruise’s executive vice president of engineering, will become president and chief technology officer. It said Craig Glidden also will serve as president and continue as chief administrative officer for Cruise, an appointment announced earlier. Mo Elshenawy, Cruise's executive vice president of engineering, will become president and chief technology officer. Mo Elshenawy, who is currently executive vice president of engineering at Cruise, will serve as president and chief technology officer for Cruise. Craig Glidden will serve as president and continue as chief administrative officer. Jon McNeill, who is a member of GM’s board of directors and Cruise’s board, has been appointed vice chairman of Cruise’s board, the spokesperson said.

Ammann, who had once competed with Barra for the top spot at GM, wanted to keep the focus on robotaxis, while Barra and the GM board wanted to go big, including putting Cruise’s technology in luxury Cadillac vehicles. The announcement at CES certainly seemed to confirm that version of events. "This orderly pause is a further step to rebuild public trust while we undergo a full safety review," the company wrote in a statement about the decision early last week after a quarterly board meeting in San Francisco. "We will continue to operate our vehicles in closed course training environments and maintain an active simulation program in order to stay focused on advancing AV technology." Since then, the autonomous vehicles have drawn complaints for making unexpected, traffic-clogging stops that critics say threaten to inconvenience other travelers and imperil public safety. Kyle Vogt, the CEO of self-driving car developer Cruise who founded the company before its acquisition by General Motors in 2016, resigned this evening.

And it comes a day after the chief executive publicly apologized for leading Cruise to such a fraught juncture. Cruise is owned by General Motors, which bought the company in 2016. Vogt expressed optimism about Cruise's future without him, saying the team is "executing on a solid, multi-year roadmap and an exciting product vision." For quite some time, we’ll think “Cruise alleges...” in front of any statement from Cruise. They have earned that impression, and must earn their way out of it.

Toyota’s vision for a futuristic city teeming with self-driving cars has been significantly delayed. In 2022, AV investments went down nearly 60 percent year over year as startups struggled through layoffs or outright closures. Cruise CEO and co-founder Kyle Vogt resigned Sunday night less than a month after the struggling robotaxi company lost its license to operate in California and paused operations of its autonomous fleet across the country. The subsidiary of General Motors has been widely criticized for an aggressive expansion plan that did not adequately consider safety.