Cruise CEO And Founder Kyle Vogt Resigns Amid GM’s Autonomous Car Crisis

Kyle Vogt, founder and current CEO of the General Motors-owned Cruise autonomous robotaxi company announced his retirement on Sunday.

Vogt’s departure comes just days after Cruise paused all of its ride-hailing operations in San Francisco and several other cities it operates in.

A Cruise vehicle was involved in an accident in San Francisco on October 2, in which one of its cars struck a pedestrian that had been hit by another vehicle, then dragged the victim to the side of the road, apparently unable to detect that they were caught underneath the car.

In the wake of the incident, Cruise ceased operations of its vehicles without backup drivers on board, recalled all of them to update their software to prevent the same scenario and paused production of the upcoming Origin model, which is designed without any controls for a human driver.

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Vogt was a co-founder of Twitch and founded cruise in 2013. General Motors took a controlling stake in the company in 2016 and installed then-GM President Dan Amman as CEO in 2019. Amman left the company in 2021 without explanation and was replaced as CEO by Vogt, who had been serving as president and chief technology officer. The following year Amman became President Low Carbon Solutions at ExxonMobil.

“Cruise is still just getting started, and I believe it has a great future ahead,” Vogt wrote on X.

“The folks at Cruise are brilliant, driven, and resilient. They’re executing on a solid, multi-year roadmap and an exciting product vision. I’m thrilled to see what Cruise has in store next!”

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Mo Elshenawy, Cruise’s executive vice president of engineering, will take over as president and chief technology officer, but a new CEO has not been named.

General Motors has not yet issued a separate statement on Vogt’s departure.