General Motors’ self-driving subsidiary, Cruise, has hired Louise Zhang, a top engineer at Lucid Motors who helped build Tesla’s safety team, as its first dedicated safety chief.
Zhang oversaw vehicle safety and regulatory compliance for Lucid since 2015 after spending nearly six years at Tesla. She was responsible for overall safety of the Model S sedan and Model X SUV, which received five-star ratings in government crash testing.
Zhang also previously worked as an engineer at Delphi Automotive, leading safety system integration projects with Chinese automakers in Shanghai.
“Louise has dedicated her career to making cars and roads safer, and as we continue on our mission to build the safest self-driving service, she will play a critical role overseeing our validation capabilities and the development of innovative safety solutions and best practices across hardware and software,” Cruise said in a statement.
Zhang’s position, vice president of product safety, is a newly created role, a Cruise spokeswoman said. Chief Technology Officer Kyle Vogt, who founded the company before GM bought it in 2016, had been leading its safety efforts.
There are three main pillars to safety in both self-driving and human-driven vehicles, Zhang said in a Medium post announcing her new role at Cruise: active safety, such as cameras and radar; passive safety, such as seatbelts and airbags; and post-crash safety, such as GM’s OnStar service.
“We will continue to advance all three of these areas in order to deliver the safest self-driving technology — you cannot have one without the other,” Zhang wrote. “But active safety is where I think we will see the most technical innovation in ensuring that AVs are better than human drivers.”