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Cruise, the general subsidiary of General Motors’ autonomous vehicles, has appointed former Delta Air Lines chief operating officer Gil West as its first chief operating officer, the company said Friday.
West retired at the end of September after 12 years at the airline in Atlanta. 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. He started shortly before Delta’s merger with Northwest in 2008 and was named Delta’s COO in 2014.
“Gil’s record of incredible customer experience, exceptional operating performance and impeccable safety, all on a large scale, fits in perfectly with Cruise as we embark on the journey to commercialize our self-driving technology,” said Dan Ammann, CEO of Cruise. a statement said. .
West is the second Delta executive to join the automaker in recent months. GM stripped Delta chief financial officer Paul Jacobson as new chief financial officer in October. Jacobson replaces Dhivya Suryadevara, who is leaving GM unexpectedly for digital payment company Stripe, with effect from 1 December.
The commercialization of self-driving cars takes much longer than most people thought, even a few years ago. Despite significant hype on Wall Street and companies including Cruise, and promising driverless fleets at or now, Alphabet’s Waymo remains the only company operating self-driving vehicles for public use in Arizona.
Cruise had planned to launch a robotic taxi fleet in San Francisco in 2019, but the plans were delayed indefinitely for further testing.
“Cruise is leading the way in 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 lifetime than the shift to self-management. I have trained my entire career for an opportunity like this.”