Employment at General Motors’ autonomous driving subsidiary Cruise has been a revolving door of sorts in the past few months, with Founder Kyle Vogt and Chief Product Officer Daniel Kan both recently resigning, while other company leaders were fired. Now, Cruise’s Hardware Chief handed in his resignation letter.
According to a report from Reuters, Carl Jenkins – who also served as Cruise’s Autonomous Vehicle Platforms Senior Vice President – announced this decision via social media. In his post, Jenkins also explained that his team was responsible for developing the robotaxi company’s self-driving hardware, which includes microchips, sensors and computers, and worked alongside General Motors on product development.
It’s worth noting that the reasoning behind this resignation was not publicly disclosed.
“I recognize that this came as unexpected news. While we’re in a transitional period right now, all of us here at Cruise are getting to define what comes next – that’s an incredibly exciting place to be,” Cruise Co-President Mo Elshenawy claimed in a prepared statement.
Elshenawy continued to explain that the autonomous vehicle platforms team was “central to our ‘Back to the Mission’ work, to improving our detection systems, compute and sensor suites for current and future programs so we can return to the road as soon as possible.”
As a reminder, General Motors CEO Mary Barra recently commented that the Detroit-based automaker is looking to relaunch its self-driving subsidiary sometime this year, and went on to elaborate that GM considers Cruise an “incredibly valuable asset.” Notably, this comes not long after Cruise had its budget slashed by approximately $1 billion for the 2024 calendar year, which itself was in response to the October 2023 incident where a pedestrian was trapped and dragged underneath a Cruise robotaxi unit after they had been struck by a human-driven vehicle.
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My prediction of GM being one of the first Automakers to license FSD Software from Tesla is getting a lot closer