Whether or not Cruise’s cars return to San Francisco’s roads next year, you can still expect the embattled self-driving-car company to have a presence at Oracle Park.
Cruise’s partnership with the San Francisco Giants — which included a sponsored patch on the team’s home jerseys for the first time in the team’s 140-year history — will continue next season amid the company’s uncertain future, according to the team.
The General Motors subsidiary, headquartered in The City, laid off nearly a quarter of its full-time workers this month after the automaker said it would slash hundreds of millions of dollars from the self-driving subsidiary’s budget.
Cruise’s patch didn’t appear on Jung Hoo Lee’s jersey in his introductory press conference last week, raising questions about whether the Giants’ jerseys would still be sponsored next year.
But a Giants spokesperson told The Examiner on Tuesday morning that the organization’s “partnership with Cruise has not changed.” The Giants announced in early August that their “exclusive” agreement with Cruise — including installing hundreds of electric-vehicle chargers around Oracle Park — would run through 2025.
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GM announced the cuts after Cruise pulled its cars from roads across the country following a September accident in which one of its autonomous vehicles dragged a San Francisco woman more than 20 feet.
A human driver struck the woman and sent her into the path of the Cruise car. The woman, who has not been publicly identified, was still hospitalized in good condition as of last week.
The accident prompted federal and state probes into the company, and state regulators are considering rehearing Cruise’s permit to charge passengers without restrictions in San Francisco. The California Public Utilities Commission originally approved Cruise’s permit by a 3-1 vote in mid-August.
That decision, as well as Cruise’s safety record prior to the vote, prompted backlash from city legislators, first responders and labor groups. The Giants announced the partnership a week before the CPUC vote.
Cruise announced last week that it would lay off 900 workers. Mo Elshenawy, Cruise’s president and chief technology officer, told workers that the company would prioritize relaunching its commercial autonomous-vehicle service “in one city to start,” but he didn’t specify where that would be.
