One of Cruise’s writers has left the company, which is bad news for General Motors’ self-driving car company, Cruise. Cruise used to be a leader in driving automation, but since one of its cars hit and pulled a pedestrian in San Francisco, the company has had a hard time. Seven years after the company was founded, Kyle Vogt, one of its two founders and later CEO, said on X that he was leaving the business. Most likely, Vogt’s exit has something to do with the accident on October 2nd, in which a hit-and-run driver pushed a pedestrian into the path of a Cruise AV, which picked up the victim and drove off. When Cruise first met with officials, it didn’t say that its vehicle had dragged the victim 20 feet under the car. California took away Cruise’s license to drive self-driving cars on public roads after this information was found. Cruise stopped using its fleet of “supervised” self-driving cars after that. The company blog says that the fleet has started working again this month. However, TechCrunch says that the company has fired contract workers and still needs to find a new CEO. At Cruise, the mood is still low. Reuters says Cruise has lost $8 billion since it began, with $728 million lost in the third quarter. General Motors CEO Mary Barra is said to have kept supporting Cruise, but Honda, which is GM’s technical partner, is said to have stopped giving money to the company. The company Cruise was started in 2013 when self-driving cars seemed like a sure thing. The partly eyes-off assist feature that Mercedes released this year is the most similar car on the market to the self-driving car that Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla, said would be ready by 2017. Cars that drive themselves seem farther away than ever and more and more like a money pit with little to no chance of coming back.
