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Cruise’s high-profile president, general engines‘ autonomous driving unit is leaving the company, car maker said thursday without giving reason.
The director is Dan Ammann, a former investment banker from New Zealand. He stepped down as GM chief to take over Cruise At the beginning of 2019. Since then, as the magnitude of the technical challenge has become clearer, expectations for autonomous driving have dwindled. serious accidents We highlighted the risks.
Cruise, which GM bought for $1 billion in 2016, is testing fleets of more than 300 autonomous vehicles in San Francisco and Phoenix, according to its website. But a self-driving service that GM says will be available in 2019 has not materialized.
Less than nine months ago, John Krafcik The CEO of Alphabet’s autonomous driving unit, Waymo, has stepped down.
In both cases, administrators had “promised roadmaps with different milestones, and those milestones were not met,” said Raj Rajkumar, who heads the autonomous driving program at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. “In the end, that takes a toll.”
Like Mr Ammann, the former head of Hyundai’s North America division, Mr. Krafcik, came from a management background at a time when the challenges to autonomous driving were mostly technical and required senior executives with a deep knowledge of technology.
GM said Cruise co-founder Kyle Vogt, who is now chairman and technical director, will serve as interim CEO. Wesley Bush, a GM board member and former CEO of aerospace company Northrop Grumman, will become Cruise’s board member.
Cruise showed off prototypes of an electric passenger vehicle called Origin without pedals or steering wheel. Cruise says the vehicle is “almost ready to roll off the assembly line” in a statement. Web site.
In an investor presentation in October, GM executives said they believe an autonomous taxi service could eventually grow into a $50 billion business.
“We hope to scale this business very quickly,” he said. Mr Ammann told investors: during the event.
But robot taxis like Origin are among the most difficult types of autonomous vehicles to deploy. “The robo-taxi market is a hard sell given the current state of autonomous technology,” said Mr. Rajkumar, who has previously received research funding from GM.
Recently, Cruise and GM have highlighted the role that autonomous driving technology can play in making cars safer. Cruise will play an “integrative role” in helping GM follow markets “beyond road sharing and delivery,” the automaker said on Thursday.
Mr Ammann did not respond to an email asking for comment. A spokesperson for Cruise declined to comment.
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