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Cruise To Slash Workforce By Nearly 50% After GM Cuts Funding To Robotaxi Operations (techcrunch.com) 20

Posted by msmash from the tough-luck dept.
Autonomous vehicle company Cruise will lay off about half of its 2,100 employees and remove several top executives, including CEO Marc Whitten, as parent company General Motors shifts away from robotaxi development to focus on personal autonomous vehicles.

The cuts come two months after GM said it would stop funding Cruise's robotaxi program to save $1 billion annually. Affected workers will receive severance packages including eight weeks of pay and benefits through April. The restructuring follows an October incident where a Cruise vehicle dragged a pedestrian, leading to the suspension of its permits.
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Cruise To Slash Workforce By Nearly 50% After GM Cuts Funding To Robotaxi Operations More

Cruise To Slash Workforce By Nearly 50% After GM Cuts Funding To Robotaxi Operations

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  • FIRST Make self-driving private cars, that people will debug for you, while at the wheel.

    THEN make wholly-autonomous robotaxis using the knowledge gained.

    Crazy Musk was right (again).
    • We'll see about that. I don't think Tesla is on track to have functioning robotaxis anytime soon. Only waymo.

      • We'll see about that. I don't think Tesla is on track to have functioning robotaxis anytime soon. Only waymo.

        It's not clear that Tesla is even ready for Level 3, let alone Level 4/5. Tesla figured out the easy part of AVs many years ago, i.e., how to get the car to drive reasonably 99% of the time. The remaining 1% is the challenge. It's even a challenge for Waymo, but it's something that Tesla is nowhere near figuring out.

        There are two parts to this 1% challenge. First, designing an AV that handles corner cases is very difficult. Second, validating the correctness of that design is even harder. The specific

    • Wrong. It is much better (and easier) to first make robot taxis driving on a hardware platform that is stable and known, featuring expensive gear that no single user will normally pay for themselves, driving in an area you are able to control and map, and do so with a limited number of potential members of the public being impacted.

      Crazy Musk is not just as wrong as you are, his FSD is a joke, not even able to be certified for level 3 driving in countries where competitors have already achieved it to say no

  • Start up self-driving robotaxi project. Something goes wrong. Shut it all down. Oh, no, we need this. Start it back up. It's too hard to replace the people we laid off before. Shut it down again.

    This is not how you run a successful company. You're either in it for the long haul or it's just a hobby.

  • They must be serious if the CEO is let go. Luckily GM owns Cruise and will be there to hold their hand in the absence of their CEO. What could possibly go wrong?

  • GM is laser-focused on bankrupting itself. It has shot itself in the foot by removing CarPlay/Android Auto from new models, now it's killing a near-future money-making machine. They should also announce that they are going to stop the work on all EVs to complete the picture.

    At least we have Waymo in the US to compete with China. A monopoly isn't great, but at least it'll be a domestic company.
  • Interesting that this article about a Tesla competitor faltering gets coverage on Slashdot, yet there is NOTHING here about the federal government purges Oligarch Musk is performing with a team of 20-something software engineers from his various companies. Like, wouldn't there be a tech angle about how Oligarch Musk's team strong-armed their way into the US Treasury Payments system [indiatimes.com] defeating all security protocols? Nothing on Slashdot about those two federal security chiefs being forcibly removed when they [apnews.com]

    • It would be pretty hard to find a tech angle. It's something which happened with tech, but that's it. If DOGE starts mandating changes in the IT infrastructure rather than a login account, it's a story.

      Most Tesla and administration stories are negative, recently the disappearing dataset story for instance.

      • tech enough for Slashdot? (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward
        I dunno, content like this seems relevant [politico.com] to Slashdot.

        Based on her grasp of how the government's underlying technology works, Lewis says that by setting up DOGE within USDS, and installing close allies like Thomas Shedd in crucial tech positions - Shedd now holds her former job as director of TTS - Musk is setting himself up to expand his digital powers further through the technical machinery of the bureaucracy, rather than through higher-profile, and more accountable, top-level appointments.

  • Confucius say pie in the sky leads to egg on face.

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