Cruise

Last week, Emily Voorde joined our Disability at Cruise community group for a lively conversation on advocacy, allyship, and of course, AVs and the future of transportation. Thank you Emily for being a part of our monthly celebrations for Disability Pride Month!

Today, we are introducing the Cruise Emergency Responder Advisory Council, a group of leading experts dedicated to enhancing our collaboration with public safety professionals. This council aims to support the heroic efforts of first responders who work tirelessly to keep our communities safe. By working together, Emergency Responders and Cruise can achieve our shared goal of making roads safer. Read more about the council here: https://lnkd.in/g3VVG4Rq

The Houston Food Bank is continuing their vital work this week by quickly mobilizing to support those impacted by Hurricane Beryl. To bolster those efforts, they are launching their 713 Campaign. Cruise is a matching partner for this campaign and thanks to a triple match, every dollar donated will provide nine meals. If you’d like to donate to this important cause, please follow this link: https://bit.ly/3zFIlrW

Many thanks to the Houston Police Department for attending our First Responder Training earlier this month and for the robust discussion on our self-driving technology! In these trainings first responders not only get to know our mission but they also learn how to safely interact and engage with our vehicles.

Today, we are delighted to announce the appointment of Marc Whitten as our new Chief Executive Officer, effective July 16. Marc is a proven leader with decades of experience leading teams at scale with deep expertise across software, hardware, platform and services, which will be crucial to fulfilling our vision. We are also pleased to welcome Nick Mulholland as our Chief Communications and Marketing Officer. Nick’s extensive experience in building sought-after brands and driving customer growth will be invaluable as we enter the next phases of our journey. You can read more about these leadership appointments here: https://lnkd.in/gCuFZFzG

For our next installment of Meet Our Leaders, please meet Sola Lawal, GM of the Houston market. - Sola Lawal, PhD 💜🦒💜 has 9 years of experience in technology, transportation, and logistics industries where he has worked with modern service providers across ride-hailing, last-mile delivery, and third party logistics. An engineer by training, he worked as engineer at Dow Chemical and General Electric before joining Uber and Nuro, respectively, where he held various operational and leadership roles in various countries. At Cruise, he is responsible for bringing self-driving to Houston and providing topnotch experiences across the city he knows and loves.

We are honored to have attended the Points of Light conference alongside General Motors last week! Together, we discussed the importance of prioritizing civic and community engagement in Houston and in every community. Thanks to Points of Light for the opportunity -- we loved connecting with fellow business, civic and community leaders. #pointsoflight24

Houston, we missed you! Today we’re resuming driving in Houston where we’ll build on the knowledge collected last year. We’ll start with human driven vehicles and move to supervised autonomous driving with a safety driver behind the wheel in the coming weeks, guided by safety.

Thank you to the Dallas Fire and Police Departments for attending our First Responder Training last week! During these sessions, first responders not only learn about our self-driving technology and how we're working to make roads safer for all, they also receive additional guidance on how to safely interact and engage with our AVs. 

Nice to see you again, City of Dallas! This week we’re excited to start driving in Dallas as we continue to validate our self-driving technology’s end-to-end performance. Initially, human-driven vehicles will gather data before supervised autonomous driving with safety drivers is introduced in the coming weeks. We look forward to working closely with city and local leaders to significantly improve road safety and provide a more sustainable transportation option that directly addresses the needs of Dallas communities.