- Cruise’s new boss told staff the company was at an “all-time low,” Reuters reported.
- Mo Elshenawy said Cruise had taken the wrong approach to self-driving.
- The company faces an uncertain future after recalling its entire fleet of driverless cars.
Cruise’s new boss reportedly told staff the company had hit an “all-time low” after recalling its entire fleet of driverless cars following a gruesome accident.
In a company all-hands on Tuesday, Cruise president Mo Elshenawy told staff the company had taken the wrong approach to self-driving and lost the trust of stakeholders and regulators, a transcript seen by Reuters showed.
It comes as the company faces a deepening crisis following an incident in San Francisco in October in which a pedestrian was dragged 20 feet under one of its robotaxis after it ran them over.
“We went from an all-time high to an all-time low and from being an industry leader to temporarily pausing all of our operations,” Elshenawy, who replaced Cruise cofounder Kyle Vogt as the company’s leader after he resigned last month, reportedly told staff.
“We now know that we need to be significantly better than human performance and significantly better across a much wider spectrum of use cases and edge cases,” he said.
Cruise’s license to operate in California was revoked following the accident, with regulators accusing the company of failing to disclose video footage of the incident.
The company paused its US robotaxi operations and later recalled all 950 of its self-driving cars to fix the issue behind the incident in October, during which the robotaxi attempted to pull over when the pedestrian was thrown into its path after being struck by another vehicle.
Cruise faces fines and sanctions of up to $1.5 million for its handling of the crash. The driverless car company’s future looks increasingly uncertain, with owners General Motors cutting spending on the division and layoffs planned for later this month.
Elshenawy said Cruise had a long way to go to regain trust in its vehicles, with further reports emerging in recent weeks that Cruise’s driverless cars struggled to detect children and large holes.
He said the intense scrutiny had negatively impacted its employees. “This last week a Cruiser shared with me that they don’t wear their Cruise jacket in public anymore. It truly breaks my heart,” he said.
Cruise did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider, made outside normal working hours.
