GM said it will accelerate the Cruise strategy it outlined during its investor day in October, in which Cruise will help build GM’s autonomous platform.
Ammann’s departure marks a second high-profile loss for GM in a matter of days. On Wednesday, the automaker confirmed that Pamela Fletcher, GM’s vice president of global innovation, would leave the company to become chief sustainability officer for Delta Airlines.
Before taking charge of Cruise, Ammann was president of GM from 2014 to 2018. He was also the automaker’s CFO from 2011 to 2014 after more than a decade as a Wall Street banker with Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse. As managing director and head of industrial investment banking for Morgan Stanley, he was instrumental in high-profile assignments including advising GM during its 2009 restructuring, according to a GM bio.
Ammann was a key player in the acquisition of Cruise in 2016. He often said self-driving vehicle technology would be lifechanging. At the reveal of the Cruise Origin in San Francisco in early 2020, Ammann called the shared autonomous shuttle “our answer to the question about what transportation system you’d build if you could start from scratch.”
