This isn't really a surprise at this point. GM's Cruise robotaxi service went off the road more than a year ago after a terrible accident in San Francisco and lost its right to operate in the city. Not long after that the company laid off about 1/4 of its workforce. Yesterday, GM announced it was pulling the plug on the whole project despite having spent about $10 billion on it.

General Motors said on Tuesday that it would stop developing a taxi that can drive itself, ending a yearslong project that the company spent billions of dollars on and leaving the field to competitors like Tesla, Amazon and Waymo...

Elon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla, and other Silicon Valley executives have sketched a future where thousands of driverless cars ferry passengers to destinations.

But Mary T. Barra, the chief executive of G.M., suggested that the payoff was too far in the future to justify the expense of developing the technology, which has already cost the company $10 billion.

“You have to understand the cost of running a robotaxi fleet, which is not our core business and is very expensive,” she said during a conference call with Wall Street analysts on Tuesday.

Usually the time to decide something is outside your wheelhouse is before you spend $10 billion on it, not after. Tech Crunch reports on what actually happened at the company yesterday.

Several Cruise employees who spoke to TechCrunch on condition of anonymity said they were “surprised” and “blindsided” by the decision. One source told TechCrunch that employees learned about GM’s plans the same time the media did. 

Staff were told they “should be proud” of themselves and that “the technology will live on,” noting there would be a restructuring and that it would take several months for Cruise to transition to GM’s team. 

The executives provided no details about potential layoffs, according to sources. However, several employees told TechCrunch they expect job cuts. While details are slim, it’s likely that the most vulnerable will be non-engineering roles or those related to robotaxi operations, including government affairs, communications teams, ground operations, and remote assistance teams in the cities where Cruise has slowly restarted testing, such as Phoenix, Houston, and Dallas.

There are almost certainly going to be lots more layoffs but Cruise and GM are going to wait for the attention to die down a bit before making the cuts.

All of this was prompted by a couple of accidents in San Francisco, one of which seriously injured a pedestrian. A woman stepped into the street after the light turned green and was hit by a person driving a Nissan Sentra. She rolled onto the hood and ended up back in the street. The Cruise vehicle was in the next lane over and braked but still made contact with her. Had it ended there, Cruise might have been relatively in the clear since most of the damage was caused by the Nissan which immediately fled the scene, making this a hit-and-run.

But the Cruise vehicle was programmed to get out of the road after a crash and it did so. In the process of moving over, it ran over the victim and dragged her under the car for about 20 feet. She was still under the car when firefighters arrived.

Cruise compounded the problem for itself by essentially lying to NHTSA about what happened.

Footage of the crash initially shared by Cruise with The Washington Post, other media outlets and the California Department of Motor Vehicles showed its driverless vehicle stopping as soon as it made contact with the pedestrian.

But the company’s first report to NHTSA after the incident failed to mention that the vehicle subsequently started moving and “had dragged the pedestrian,” who was pulled 20 feet along the ground, according to the agency’s consent order posted Monday.

The victim survived and sued Cruise. The case was settled, reportedly for somewhere around $10 million.

Cruise was considered one of the big contenders in a position to grab a portion of the robotaxi business. With GM cutting its losses, that leaves Waymo, owned by Google, Tesla and half a dozen others still competing. Waymo is operating in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Phoenix and is expanding to three more cities soon. Tesla is promising to rollout dedicated robotaxis next year.