Hundreds of American employees are about to lose their jobs before Christmas after a global company with about 1400 employees across the United States and China is set to produce self-driving trucks.
According to the reports, TuSimple Holdings INC. is set to use self-driving cars as part of its efforts to revolutionize the shipping system by making truck drivers redundant.
However, this movement would cut the costs and truck drivers will no longer be needed which sparked controversies among the public.
The controversy arose after the company announced the change on their official website.
“On December 22, 2021, TuSimple made history by becoming the world’s first to operate a fully autonomous semi-truck run on open public roads without a human on board while naturally interacting with other motorists. The TuSimple Driver Out program required our upfitted self-driving truck to travel on surface streets and highways, to safely navigate traffic signals, emergency lane vehicles, on- and off-ramps, and highway lane changes in open traffic,” the company stated.
“Driver Out represents an exciting step in the evolution of self-driving trucking. It also provided crucial validation of the safety of our L4 self-driving truck technology,” they added.
However, the adoption of this technology means cutting off half of its workforce.
According to the people familiar with this matter, the company is planning to cut at least half of its workforce before Christmas which would likely affect at least 700 employees across San Diego, Arizona, Texas and China.
In the report released by Wall Street Journal, it was revealed that “As part of the downsizing, much of TuSimple’s operation in Tucson, Ariz., where it does a lot of its test driving, will be eliminated, and the team that works on the algorithms for the self-driving software will be pared back significantly.”
“TuSimple is cutting costs and scaling back its ambitions as it reels from a string of crises this year, including a crash of one of its self-driving trucks in April, the loss of key business partnerships, two CEO changes, a plummeting stock price and concurrent government investigations,” the report added.
This comes after the company reportedly fired “its chief executive and co-founder, Xiaodi Hou, after an internal board investigation found that Hou had shared confidential information with Hydron, a Chinese trucking startup that operates mostly in China and is funded by Chinese investors,” Fox News in its exclusive report revealed.
“Following his ouster, Hou recruited TuSimple co-founder and Hydron founder Mo Chen to strike back at the board, firing them. Together they brought back Lu to run the company,” Fox News added.
