Cruise Origin shuttle without a driver
Cruise
Cruise, General Motors’ majority autonomous vehicle subsidiary, has hired former Delta Air Lines Chief Operating Officer Gil West as its first COO, the company said Friday.
West retired in late September after 12 years with the Atlanta-based airline. He was responsible for Delta’s global 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 appointed Delta’s COO in 2014.
“Gil’s track record of delivering a great customer experience, exceptional operational performance and impeccable safety, all on a grand scale, is a perfect fit for Cruise as we embark on the journey to commercialize our self-driving technology,” said Cruise CEO Dan Ammann in a statement .
West is the second Delta manager to join the carmaker in recent months. GM poached Paul Jacobson, Delta CFO, in October as its new Chief Financial Officer. Jacobson replaced Dhivya Suryadevara, who unexpectedly left GM for digital payments company Stripe, effective December 1.
The commercialization of self-driving cars is taking much longer than most thought, even a few years ago. Despite significant hype on Wall Street and companies including Cruise, currently promising self-driving fleets, Alphabet’s Waymo remains the only company to operate self-driving public-use vehicles in Arizona.
Cruise planned to launch a robot taxi fleet in San Francisco in 2019, but those plans were indefinitely delayed for further testing.
Cruise is at the forefront of changing lives and improving the status quo of transportation, West said in a statement. “There will be no greater shift in the transportation industry in my life than the transition to self-driving … I’ve trained my entire career for an opportunity like this.”