Cruise says it won’t produce any of its Origin self-driving vans in the near future, alongside an announcement that the company is substantially scaling back its operations going forward.
The General Motors (GM) self-driving subsidiary Cruise has been on a nightmare spiral over the last several weeks, after one of the company’s driverless vehicles ran over a pedestrian in San Francisco early last month. Following news that Cruise and GM would halt production of the Origin self-driving van, the subsidiary said on Wednesday that it wouldn’t produce any of the driverless vehicles in 2024, adding that it will reduce operations to just one city once it restarts operations, according to a report from Automotive News.
“We’ve made the decision to focus on the Bolt-based Cruise AVs in the near term, with a longer-term strategy around the Origin,” a Cruise spokesperson said.
Cruise had either already debuted or was planning to debut its driverless vehicles in 13 U.S. cities. However, the company didn’t say which city it would select nor did it say when operations would resume.
The company also says it will produce a “small number” of pre-commercial prototypes in the coming weeks, though a GM spokesperson added that the company wouldn’t build production models or prototypes in 2024.
Currently, Cruise doesn’t have a timeline for resuming Origin production.
It’s not entirely clear how many Origin vans GM has produced for Cruise by this point, though former CEO Kyle Vogt said in a meeting this month that the automaker had produced hundreds of the vehicle so far.
Vogt resigned as CEO at Cruise earlier this week, and he was followed by former fellow executive and co-founder Daniel Kan.
After the October 2 accident in which a Cruise robotaxi hit and pinned a pedestrian who had been struck by another car, the company’s permit to operate driverless vehicles was revoked by the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV). The company also faces a federal investigation from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), and it has hired third-party legal and tech firms to help review its technology and its response to the accident.
Cruise recalls almost 1,000 self-driving cars following pedestrian accident
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