Cruise CEO and co-founder Kyle Vogt has resigned from his role at the autonomous vehicle venture owned by General Motors, as per several news publications.
Mo Elshenawy, who previously served as executive vice president of engineering at Cruise, will now serve as president and CTO for Cruise, the company said.
Vogt confirmed his resignation Sunday night in a social media post on X, saying he intends “to spend time with my family and explore some new ideas.”
Cruise in recent months has spoken of ambitious plans to expand to additional cities offering fully autonomous taxi rides.
Crusie this month pulled all of its vehicles from testing in the US, to conduct a safety review after an accident on October 2, which involved another vehicle and ended up with one of Cruise’s self driving taxis, dragging a pedestrian.
“As CEO, I take responsibility for the situation Cruise is in today. There are no excuses and there is no sugar coating what has happened. We need to double down on safety, transparency and community engagement,” he wrote in an email to the staff, reported exclusively by Reuters.
Cruise competes with Aplhabet’s Waymo in deploying autonomous vehicles.
In November, the California Department of Motor Vehicles ordered Cruise to remove its driverless cars from statw roads, calling them a risk to public, and saying that the company had misrepresented the safety of its technology.