General Motors Co’s self-driving car unit Cruise told it’s employees on Thursday that the company decided to sack workers, the most recent start-up within the nascent industry to chop jobs during the coronavirus pandemic.
Cruise officials acknowledged they were cutting jobs, but denied to disclose the number. According to an internal email partially read to Reuters, about 8% of the staff would be laid off, which amounts to over 140 people.
The outbreak has caused funding to dry up within the autonomous driving industry. that’s only the most recent challenge in a challenging sector whose promise of large-scale rollouts of so-called robotaxis has been pushed out by a few years.
“In this time of great change, we’re fortunate to have a crystal clear mission and billions in the bank. The actions we took today reflect us doubling down on our engineering work and engineering talent,” Cruise spokesperson Milin Mehta told Reuters.
The cuts at Cruise, which had 1,800 full-time employees, come just a week after General Motors CEO Mary Barra said the No. 1 U.S. automaker’s commitment to Cruise was “unwavering” and it had been growing the business.
“Cruise is well capitalized,” she told analysts on a May 6 conference call after GM posted stronger-than-expected first-quarter profit. “We have and will continue to grow our team by recruiting and retaining the very best engineering and leadership talent.”
The email said layoffs at Cruise include staff at an engineering team in Pasadena, California, that works on Lidar, a sensor technology that uses pulsed laser light to sense objects,like the way radar uses radio waves. The e-mail was sent by Cruise CEO Dan Ammann on Thursday.
Lidar start-ups had mushroomed when self-driving car tech drew billions of dollars in investments.
The cuts at Cruise echo pain felt elsewhere within the industry.
