General Motors Co.'s Cruise self-driving car unit has hit "historic lows" and its new chief said he is committed to restoring regulators and the public's trust after the company removes all its vehicles from U.S. roads."Our integrity and our abilities have been called into question, and it really hurts," Mo-El-Shenawi said at an all-staff meeting on Tuesday, according to transcripts of the call reviewed by Reuters. "We went from an all-time high to an all-time low, from being an industry leader to temporarily suspending all operations."
Elshenaoui was named Cruise president last month after Cruise's CEO stepped down amid regulatory scrutiny following an incident in which a woman was dragged after an accident in San Francisco.
He said Cruise's approach to developing self-driving cars that are simply better than humans is "wrong and inconsistent with the expectations our stakeholders have for us, which we now know need to be substantially better than human performance and substantially better than humans in a wider range of use cases and edge cases."
Cruise is under increasing pressure after regulators said it did not fully disclose details of an October accident. Last month, Cruise suspended all driverless and supervised vehicle travel in the U.S. and expanded a safety review of its robotic axles, ousting CEO Kyle Vogt and chief product officer Daniel Kan.
Elshenavi seemed to acknowledge that the self-driving car company, which competes with Alphabet Inc's Waymo and Amazon.com Inc's Zoox, has a tough road ahead. "We don't have a deep level of trust with all our stakeholders and regulators," he said.
"Last week, a cruiser told me that they no longer wear cruise jackets in public," Elshenaoui said. "I'm really sad."
A California agency said in a letter last week that Cruise could face a $1.5 million fine and additional penalties for failing to disclose details about an Oct. 2 crash in which one of its self-driving taxis dragged a pedestrian who was struck by another vehicle.
The California Public Utilities Commission ordered Cruise to appear at a Feb. 6 hearing for "misleading the commission by omitting the scope and severity of the accident" and "making comments that misled the public regarding interactions with the commission."
The company has hired a law firm to help it conduct a safety review and will remove all of its vehicles from U.S. public roads in the meantime. Parent company General Motors said on Monday that the automaker's external review of Cruise safety will last until the first quarter of 2024.
Cruise said it would make layoffs later this month but declined to give more details to employees on Tuesday. The company has stopped taking questions from employees at all-hands meetings, which was previously a fixture.
The company's chief administrative officer, Craig Glidden, said his focus was on "resetting" regulatory relationships and "building trust," acknowledging that "we still have a long way to go." "I plan to work with the legal and government affairs departments to complete all the paperwork we need to submit," he said.
Cruise said at the meeting that the company was re-evaluating its workers' compensation structure after suspending its stock buyback program, a decision that led Vogt to apologize to employees last month. An executive told the meeting that workers will be eligible for bonuses and promotions in January.
"At General Motors, we have encountered greater difficulties than Cruise faces today, but we have become a stronger company as a result. I have no doubt that Cruise will become a stronger company," said Glidden, a former lawyer for Cruise's parent company.