Cruise Origin driverless transportation
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Cruise, the majority autonomous vehicle subsidiary of General Motors, hired former Delta Air Lines chief operating officer Gil West as its first COO, the company said on Friday.
West retired in late September, after 12 years with the Atlanta-based airline. He was responsible for Delta’s worldwide operations, including 366 airports in 66 countries, 1,300 aircraft, 200 million customers per year and managed a budget of $ 16 billion. He started shortly before Delta’s 2008 merger with Northwest and was named COO of Delta in 2014.
“Gil’s track record of delivering incredible customer experience, exceptional operational performance and flawless safety, all on a large scale, is a perfect fit for Cruise when we started the journey to market our autonomous driving technology,” said Cruise CEO, Dan Ammann, in a statement.
West is the second Delta executive to join the automaker’s operations in recent months. GM hired Delta CFO Paul Jacobson as its new chief financial officer in October. Jacobson replaced Dhivya Suryadevara, who unexpectedly left GM for digital payments company Stripe, starting December 1.
The commercialization of autonomous cars is taking much longer than most thought, even a few years ago. Despite significant hype on Wall Street and companies, including Cruise, promising driverless fleets around now, Alphabet’s Waymo remains the only company that operates autonomous vehicles for public use in Arizona.
Cruise planned to launch a robot fleet in San Francisco in 2019, but those plans have been postponed indefinitely for further testing.
“Cruise is leading the way in changing lives and increasing the status quo of transportation,” West said in a statement. “There will be no greater change in the transportation industry in my life than the move to autonomous driving … I have been training my entire career for an opportunity like this.”