General Motors Co.’s troubled self-driving unit, Cruise, said late Tuesday that it has hired a veteran executive from Amazon.com Inc. and Microsoft Corp. as its new CEO. This comes seven months after the board fired the previous CEO and co-founder because of a string of accidents and a fleet grounding.
Cruise said that Marc Whitten would be its CEO starting July 16. Cruise said, “Marc is a proven leader with decades of experience on the front lines of technology changes.”
Whitten helped create Microsoft’s Xbox and Xbox Live as an engineer. At Amazon AMZN, +0.41%, he oversaw a variety of entertainment products and services, such as Fire TV, Kindle, and Amazon apps and entertainment services, as general manager and vice president.
When Whitten was chief product and technology officer at Unity Software Inc. U, -4.07%, he helped the company use AI and real-time 3D technology in new ways. This technology runs most real-time games and apps, according to the GM GM, -3.53% unit.
Kyle Voigt, one of the founders of Cruise, quit as CEO in November, not long after a crash in San Francisco that injured a pedestrian and caused Cruise to stop operating on public roads. In less than a month, Cruise announced layoffs and the departure of more executives.
Early this year, Cruise reportedly paid at least $8 million to a pedestrian who was seriously hurt. In January, the subsidiary said that the U.S. FBI and the Securities and Exchange Commission were looking into what happened in October.
As of June, Cruise had started supervised autonomous driving again in Phoenix, Houston, and Dallas. They were also still testing in Dubai.
