General Motors Co’s self-driving car subsidiary Cruise will be hiring 1,000 more people in next nine months, as announced the company on Monday.
General Motors, the No.1 U.S. carmaker, is aiming to launch a robotaxi service by the end of this year and announced hiring is likely to be a part of its strategy to boost the production process.
Cruise, which currently employs more than 1,000 staff, is planning to double its strength by end of this year, Cruise spokesman Ray Wert told Reuters.
Cruise did not specify the exact break down of the hiring, but company’s main aim through these hiring is to attract the engineers mostly, as without giving a specific number, Wert told that majority of those hiring will comprise of engineers.
Cruise, commence an independent startup, was acquired by General Motors and after that it tested self-driving cars on the roads of California, Michigan and Arizona as a division of the Detroit automaker.
Japan’s SoftBank and Honda recently made major investments in Cruise, which has reported loss of $728 million in last year, 19 percent more than the loss faced by company in 2017.
Waymo has started operating an autonomous ride-hailing service in Arizona on a smaller scale and Ford is stepping toward commercialization of its self-driving cars by collaborating with Postmates and Domino’s, but GM with its Cruise still remained slower to make moves similar to its rivals with the exception of its first commercial partnership with DoorDash to deliver its foods using Cruise’s vehicles.
For its office space in San Francisco, Cruise, which has a market capitalization value of about $143.6 billion, is also planning to increase it by three fold.
Tech Crunch, a technology news website, reported on Monday that Cruise has decided to appoint Dropbox Inc’s Arden Hoffman as head of its human resource division.
