General Motors lays off more than a thousand employees

The US car manufacturer General Motors (GM) is laying off more than 1,000 software engineers. The car manufacturer wants to streamline its software and service organization. This was reported by the Bloomberg news agency on Monday, citing a person familiar with the matter.

According to the report, more than 600 jobs will be cut in the US state of Michigan alone. "As we shape GM's future, we must focus on speed and excellence, make bold decisions and prioritize the investments that will have the greatest impact," Bloomberg quoted from a GM statement on Monday confirming the job cuts, but without giving exact figures on how many employees will be laid off in software development.

In recent years, the company has hired more software development staff as part of its push into electric vehicles, autonomous driving cars and software-related services. According to Bloomberg, the car manufacturer hopes that new services such as connecting customers with charging stations or digital content will one day lead to billions in annual revenue. But that seems a long way off.

General Motors has recently been struggling with technical problems with the Blazer and Lyriq models in particular. For example, the company temporarily halted sales of its electric Chevrolet Blazer SUV. With the Blazer, GM faced negative reactions from many customers when it developed its own infotainment system for the vehicle in order to ban Apple's Carplay and Google's Android Auto from its electric cars in future. Among other things, the car manufacturer had problems with the screen for the interior, according to Bloomberg. There were also problems with the Cadillac Lyriq EV, some of which were due to software glitches. However, it is unclear whether there is a connection with the announced redundancies.

(akn)