General Motors Co.'s self-driving car maker Cruise said on Tuesday that a video game industry veteran will become its new CEO, eight months after the previous CEO resigned following a series of safety issues with its vehicles.
Mark Whitten, most recently an executive at video-game technology company Unity, has had a tumultuous year for Cruise, which in October was ordered by California regulators to remove its fleet of vehicles from the roads after a series of traffic accidents, the worst of which occurred on Oct. 2 when a pedestrian was dragged under Cruise's car on a San Francisco street.
Cruise has since laid off a quarter of its workforce and fired nine executives.
Whitten, who will start July 16, is a founding Xbox engineer and former general manager at Amazon. He joins Cruise's president and chief technology officer Mo El-Shenawy and president and chief administrative officer Craig Glidden, who were appointed by Cruise's board of directors in November to lead the company following the resignation of former Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt.
“This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be part of this transformation,” Whitten said in a statement. “The Cruise team is building world-class technology, and I look forward to working with them to help deliver on this important mission.”
Since Vogt's resignation, Cruise has been slow to reopen, a far cry from the rapid expansion it saw a year ago to 15 cities in 10 states. In May, Cruise executives told The New York Times that they were in no rush to reopen and that safety was Cruise's “North Star.”
GM acquired Cruise in 2016 for $1.6 billion.
Cruise also hired Nick Mulholland, who worked at electric-vehicle maker Rivian, as its new chief communications and marketing officer. The company said in a statement that El Shenawy and Glidden will remain with the company and report to Whitten.
In a separate announcement, GM named another video-game alumnus, Grant Dixton, as its new executive vice president and chief legal and public policy officer. Dixton previously held senior executive roles at Activision Blizzard.
