Cruise Origin driverless shuttle
Cruise ship
Cruise, a majority-owned autonomous vehicle subsidiary of General Motors, has hired former Delta Air Lines chief operating officer Gil West as chief operating officer, the company said Friday.
West retired in late September after twelve years in the Atlanta airline. He was responsible for Delta’s global operations, including 366 airports in 66 countries, 1,300 aircraft, 200 million customers a year and managed a budget of $ 16 billion. It began shortly before Delta’s merger with Northwest in 2008 and was named Delta’s COO in 2014.
“Gil’s experience in delivering an incredible customer experience, exceptional operational performance and impeccable, large-scale safety is a perfect fit for Cruise when we begin the journey to commercialize our autonomous driving technology,” he said. Dan Ammann, CEO of Cruise. .
West is the second Delta executive to join the automotive operations in recent months. GM sacked Paul Jacobson, Delta’s chief financial officer, as the new chief financial officer in October. Jacobson replaced Dhivya Suryadevara, who unexpectedly left GM for digital payment company Stripe, starting December 1st.
The marketing of cars with automatic driving takes much longer than previously thought, even a few years ago. Despite a big hype on Wall Street and businesses, including Cruise, promising driverless fleets for or around now, Alphabet’s Waymo remains the only company operating autonomous vehicles for public use in Arizona.
Cruise had planned to launch a robot taxi fleet in San Francisco in 2019, but those plans were delayed indefinitely for further testing.
“The cruise is leading the way to change lives and improve the status quo of transportation,” West said in a statement. “There will be no bigger change in the transportation industry in my life than the move to self-driving … I’ve been training my whole career to have an opportunity like this.”