Cruise Employees 'Blindsided' By GM's Plan To End Robotaxi Program (techcrunch.com) 70
An anonymous reader shares a report: The news came by Slack message. Cruise CEO Marc Whitten, who took the top post in June, posted a message Tuesday afternoon in the company's announcements channel along with a link to a press release entitled "GM to refocus autonomous driving development on personal vehicles."
GM, which acquired the self-driving car startup in 2016, would no longer fund the company, ending a mission that hundreds of Cruise engineers had worked on for years. Minutes later, during an all-hands meeting, Cruise employees learned a few more details. The self-driving car company would be absorbed into parent company GM and combined with the automaker's own efforts to develop driver assistance features -- and eventually fully autonomous personal vehicles. Whether their jobs would be safe or cut was, and still is, unclear.
That meeting was short and unsatisfactory, according to one source, who noted that the senior leadership team was also surprised by this turn of events. Whitten, president and chief technology officer Mo Elshenawy, and chief administrative officer Craig Glidden, led the all-hands. Several Cruise employees who spoke to TechCrunch on condition of anonymity said they were "surprised" and "blindsided" by the decision. One source told TechCrunch that employees learned about GM's plans the same time the media did.
GM, which acquired the self-driving car startup in 2016, would no longer fund the company, ending a mission that hundreds of Cruise engineers had worked on for years. Minutes later, during an all-hands meeting, Cruise employees learned a few more details. The self-driving car company would be absorbed into parent company GM and combined with the automaker's own efforts to develop driver assistance features -- and eventually fully autonomous personal vehicles. Whether their jobs would be safe or cut was, and still is, unclear.
That meeting was short and unsatisfactory, according to one source, who noted that the senior leadership team was also surprised by this turn of events. Whitten, president and chief technology officer Mo Elshenawy, and chief administrative officer Craig Glidden, led the all-hands. Several Cruise employees who spoke to TechCrunch on condition of anonymity said they were "surprised" and "blindsided" by the decision. One source told TechCrunch that employees learned about GM's plans the same time the media did.
People are stupid (Score:5, Informative)
"One source told TechCrunch that employees learned about GM's plans the same time the media did." - No shit Sherlock. This is standard practice which prevents the risk of insider trading. Literally every employee in every company that wasn't primarily involved in such a decision finds out at the same the the media does. In fact the media often has a statement in advance with a legal moratorium applied. This applies to every announcement which may affect the share price.
I did actually once work somewhere where we found out from the media before we found out ourselves. Turns out no one figured the head office for the media businesses were in another state and they didn't specify if the moratorium expired at Standard Time or Daylight Savings Time. End result we were watching at 10am the news during lunch that we'd all lose our jobs ... before the 11am all hands meeting on site.
"That meeting was short and unsatisfactory" - No shit Sherlock. What meeting have you ever where you were told suddenly what you were working on the past few years is cancelled and you left thinking "I'm really satisfied".
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Re: People are stupid (Score:2)
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Yes NDAs are perfect and they gain more power the more people sign them /s.
Sorry but the only way the NDA system works is through limited knowledge. Try and get 2,300 people to sign NDAs all at once, all without talking to their colleagues, all agreeing instead of running off from the media, many of whom likely fear from their jobs.
No. While I agree it is dehumanising to have the media find out the same time you do (actually slightly in advance of you), it is simply not workable from a liability perspective
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No. While I agree it is dehumanising to have the media find out the same time you do (actually slightly in advance of you), it is simply not workable from a liability perspective to share this information in any other way.
Many companies are somehow able to, so that's really curious how they do that if it's not possible.
This is a purely legal problem and NDA's are a legal solution. There is nothing physically stopping someone working with state secrets to spread them, but at some point you have to assume that the legal system in place are enough for a comoany to cover themselves. Then both for state secrets and insider trading you have criminal law in place.
Nothing is stopping you from driving a car into a crowd but that does
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Many companies are somehow able to, so that's really curious how they do that if it's not possible.
No they don't. This is literally SOP for every company with more than about 100 employees precisely because the nature of NDA makes it difficult to do. Additionally many larger companies offer shares as part of the compensation package meaning that employees have a vested financial interest in getting ahead of information that puts them at an even higher risk of liability.
Your assertion that many companies are somehow able to do it overlooks a lot of details.
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There's a reason why no newspapers will publish the UHC shooter's manifesto.
To the Feds, I'll keep this short, because I do respect what you do for our country. To save you a lengthy investigation, I state plainly that I wasn't working with anyone. This was fairly trivial: some elementary social engineering, basic CAD, a lot of patience. The spiral notebook, if present, has some straggling notes and To Do lists that illuminate the gist of it. My tech is pretty locked down because I work in engineering so pr
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Basically.....getting canned sucks.
There is no good way or tim
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I would say doing it in an adult human way is definitely better. This is like saying 'divorces suck, it doesn't matter if you talk about it privately first or just get a letter from the lawyer'. Well actually it kind of does matter, because if human interaction no longer matters than what does? Just money?
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yes people are stupid and it's driven by greed
classism leads to corruption, which breeds incompetency
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The appropriate thing would have been to put out the press release a minute or two after the all hands meeting began, not a few minutes before. Risk of insider trading still avoided, and you show at least a modicum of respect for your employees.
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Even the announcement of the employee meeting would trigger speculations.
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Even the announcement of the employee meeting would trigger speculations.
Not if you regularly have employee all-hands meetings. It will just be expected to be another annoying time waster.
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No one here is talking about minutes and no one would feel any different if it moved a few minutes either way. This story is not about people who found out *from* the media, though presumably those who missed the all hands meeting did.
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Which is normal for a US company. In a responsible company, important information is disseminated, if a company or department is struggling it is usually communicated to employees so that they can help identify things to improve, to improve overall productivity. American companies are the opposite, as workers are treated like dirt, the dirt will jump ship at the first sign of trouble rather than stick around and try to improve things.
In my jobs i
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I think the point is, there was no discussion... period.
Well yes that is *MY* point. You can't openly discuss something that has the ability to move a share price widely.
Which is normal for a US company. In a responsible company, important information is disseminated, if a company or department is struggling it is usually communicated to employees so that they can help identify things to improve, to improve overall productivity.
You are begging the question. Where does it say anything about the change being due to the department struggling? This looks like a strategic shift, the kind of thing that is made by senior leadership behind closed doors at literally every company on earth.
In my jobs in Australia and the UK, when there's been a termination coming I've generally known about it except for the one time the GFC happened and even then, we all really knew it would only be a matter of days until the cuts came.
That's ironic. The example I gave was literally from working at a plant in Australia owned by a UK overlord hahahaha. And with that informati
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This is standard practice which prevents the risk of insider trading.
Only Congress is allowed to legally do insider trading. :-\
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You mean the President and Supreme Court Justices aren't?
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No shit Sherlock. What meeting have you ever where you were told suddenly what you were working on the past few years is cancelled and you left thinking "I'm really satisfied".
The self-driving car feature is hardly cancelled. GM wouldn't be absorbing the company where that the case. IMO, Cruise wasn't ever going to have a huge demand. People in the US want their own cars and the convenience the cars offer. Cruise is mostly a transportation service for people who want to use a taxi, for example for a ride to the airport, or people who don't have a driver's license or a car. Also, a large number of companies are pursuing this, so it's better to get out of the market now and use the
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No shit Sherlock. What meeting have you ever where you were told suddenly what you were working on the past few years is cancelled and you left thinking "I'm really satisfied".
The self-driving car feature is hardly cancelled. GM wouldn't be absorbing the company where that the case. IMO, Cruise wasn't ever going to have a huge demand. People in the US want their own cars and the convenience the cars offer. Cruise is mostly a transportation service for people who want to use a taxi, for example for a ride to the airport, or people who don't have a driver's license or a car. Also, a large number of companies are pursuing this, so it's better to get out of the market now and use their tested technology elsewhere.
This. Robotaxis owned by fleet companies are a dystopian future for most people. Why? Because it will always be cheaper to own a car than to rent one from someone else trying to make a profit off of you. Car companies that focus on fleet programs and don't acknowledge that their tech also has to find its way into the hands of individual car buyers are clearly detached from reality.
The real question mark in my mind is Waymo. I don't know what they hope to achieve. At this point, they're the last compan
Re: People are stupid (Score:2)
"it will always be cheaper to own a car than to rent one from someone else trying to make a profit off of you."
Unless they change the registration fee and insurance premium structures to benefit fleet operators and fuck the rest of us.
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"it will always be cheaper to own a car than to rent one from someone else trying to make a profit off of you."
Unless they change the registration fee and insurance premium structures to benefit fleet operators and fuck the rest of us.
Most insurance companies are nonprofits, so they have no real incentive to make their rate structure deviate significantly from actuarial tables and their vehicular equivalents, and fleet vehicles with high mileage are more likely to have an accident than individual cars, assuming all else is equal (i.e. similarly capable AI doing the driving), so barring any surprises, for-profit robotaxis should cost more per year to insure than individual cars, though to be fair, that's spread over dozens of people inste
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Most insurance companies are nonprofits, so they have no real incentive to make their rate structure deviate significantly from actuarial tables and their vehicular equivalents
You're thinking the old way, before we had a King.
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Why would you need to own a car? Right now, services like Lyft/Uber are so expensive that the break-even point of owning a car is around 400-500 miles a month. Between my wife and I, we put on about 1500 miles per month but that includes school transportation. If the price of Waymo is such that the break even is around 1000 miles a month, I probably won't own a car.
The only way Uber stays in business is because they trick people into charging less than the depreciation on their car. At some point, that model is going to come crashing down like a house of cards, because it is absolutely not sustainable in the long term.
Still, I question whether the break-even point really is that high unless you're basing it on an ICE car with oil changes and other high secondary costs. It costs me up to $30 each way to take Uber from my house to the airport, which is a 7.5-mile driv
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The US IRS considers the cost of operating your car to be $0.50/mile. I'm in no way saying that's a perfect number but it's the only one that we can really use for cost analysis. Given that I pay $200/month in insurance and probably $400 month in
Auto industry is stuffed (Score:5, Interesting)
The automotive industry is in a massive spiralling crisis right now. The price of new vehicles before COVID were artificially propped up by all the people able to get 0% interest financing deals on them. Those don't exist now. Then during COVID automakers got greedy and jacked their prices, while cutting low end models to push up revenues. The car markers are now facing a profit collapse. On top of that, many of them loaded up on cheap debt during the 2010's and now those debts have to refinanced at much higher interest rates.
Finally, almost all of them have completely failed the transition to EVs. If they do have a decent EV to sell, they are generally having to sell them at a loss, while their main domestic competitor - Tesla - still has room to cut further. And this is with Chinese EV's being held back by large tariffs in the US and EU. While these tariffs can protect their local market, it doesn't help them compete in the largest automotive market in the world - China. So they have basically lost that market now. There are also plenty of other countries which do not make cars, and will happily buy from China if they are cheaper, so they may also lose most of their other export markets as well.
The whole industry is rotten, and the current crop of CEOs are going back to the only playbook they know - cut costs, cut investment, lobby for government support, and hope that they can boost the share price in a year or two and then bail out with a golden parachute, letting the next guy take over.
Having said that, if they made me CEO, I don't know that I'd do anything different. What alternative do they have? Tell investors that their companies suck, wipe billions off their valuations, possibly have to go through bankruptcy protection and get a bailout, and then at the end of that still have to figure out how to actually make an EV that can compete with the Chinese?
Re:Auto industry is stuffed (Score:5, Informative)
I agree with you on every point but one: it may be true at the moment that tariffs are preventing companies from accessing the Chinese car market. However, the Chinese government has a long history of finding ways to ensure that the Chinese people have very limited access to products and services from outside the country. Specifically when it comes to manufactured goods, you can be sure they're always the dumper rather than the dumpee.
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If you think the price of cars was high during Covid- just wait there's more.
When the tariffs come, it won't have an immediate effect. Though after 6 to 9 months h13 steel, which is used in most tool and die product, is going to be very expensive.
That's the first bump in price. And it will get worse as the tooling wears out for particular car models. Machine tools are expensive to design, test, and manufacture
Then comes the the second fun part:.
Forget about sourcing steel to actually make the car. That will
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which should be the incentive to redevelop local industry
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Yes, but for one, that would take years or decades if it happens and for another, the local industries will charge as much (or just undercut) foreign industries
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so? it took years to get it this way and it will take years to pay for the damages already done
sadly, we're doubling down on unsustainable and irresponsible development mostly driven by upper class greed
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So the point is the economy will suffer and prices go up just so we can...regress our economy?
Many of the components will also need to be imported from the same places that we're taxing so it might still not be profitable to do the manufacturing in the country if any company were even considering it
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The US steel energy hasn't been particularly competitive for decades.
Are you going to make an investment in steel production that will take a years to repay on the off chance multiple administrations are down with that type of inflation?
Or are you going to reap the windfall profits while they're available?
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Canadian steel is doing fine thanks
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Obviously Canada is competitive, or Trump wouldn't be talking tariffs.
I know the US has also put tarrifs on Scandinavian steel specifically times too.
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too bad the evil upper class sold Americans out
Re: Auto industry is stuffed (Score:2)
"The high end fabs in Taiwan will be gone. This will also tank the auto industry."
Nope. I agree with much of what you said but you only need high end chips for self driving or really high end infotainment with high resolution 3D navigation rendering. As such the automakers could continue selling cars without that just fine.
If steel is hard to get (we produce a lot of virgin steel in the US still, though) perhaps they will switch to using more aluminum, which is superior in most ways and also saves on toolin
Re: Auto industry is stuffed (Score:2)
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What use is cheap if you can't charge it anywhere or you do a lot of long distance and don't want the PITA of finding a working charger often on some convoluted diversion off your route.
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Agreed. Charging stations aren't always in convenient or safe locations [images.are.na].
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Good luck with them getting a bailout, no way Elon would allow Trump to do that.
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"Short and unsatisfactory" (Score:2)
Not to pick on the wrong thing, but when it comes to information that impacts a division or a workforce, I have to assume that the only way the meeting would be sufficient and satisfactory would be for them to say, "Oops. Our bad. We're reversing course. Ignore what we said."
Seems like they let them continue for eight years. This can't be a complete surprise - acquisitions almost always result in the collapsing of reduntsncy.
GM CEO should be fired (Score:2)
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If you want selfdriving capabilities for your personal cars, you need as much data as possible ... That kind of data can only be gotten using cars on the streets 24/7 which is what Cruise is providing.
If they went the Tesla route and put the necessary hardware on their production cars, they'd have that data coming out of their ears. The miles driven by GM's customers dwarf anything that the Cruise unit could possibly bring to the table.
That's just to say that you don't need robotaxis to develop self driving. But that's a moot point. I think we can take this as a sign that GM isn't seriously pursuing the technology.
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Tesla works as a special case because its customers were willing to accept that they were stepping into what amounts to being a mobile telescreen, reporting on everything going on the whole time, with basically no privacy.
GM strangely used to use Buick and Oldsmobile for its technological development prototyping sort of thing. The Toronado was their first FWD car and the Riviera had their first touchscreen interface back when it was an honest to goodness cathode ray tube display.
But GM got rid of Oldsmobil
Re: GM CEO should be fired (Score:2)
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Re: GM CEO should be fired (Score:2)
Duplicate article (Score:2)
You just posted about this 10 hours prior:
https://tech.slashdot.org/story/24/12/10/2318201/gm-exits-robotaxi-market
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Not a duplicate. The first story was about GM exiting the robotaxi business this article is about Cruise staff being surprised about it.
Blindsided (Score:2)
Like what happened to that lady in San Francisco by a Cruise vehicle?
Too soon?
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*RIMSHOT*
Blindsided? (Score:2)
They lost $10 billion on Cruise. I doubt this came as a surprise. "We'll turn things around in 2025, I just know it!"
Really? (Score:2)