General Motors’ Cruise has had an exceptionally tough 2023, but the company isn’t going down without a fight or, in this case, a massive lawsuit against the city of San Francisco. GM has paid San Francisco $108 million in taxes and $13 million in interest since 2016 and now wants it back.
Rather than taxing GM and Cruise separately, as the automaker claims it should, the city lumped them together, resulting in higher tax bills.
The $121 million lawsuit states that San Francisco tying the two companies together drove their tax bill significantly higher than GM would on its own. While Cruise is a division of GM, the two operate relatively independently, with the automaker noting in the suit that they run “at arm’s length” from each other.
GM has burned a mind-boggling amount of money running Cruise and has recorded massive losses along the way, with almost $2 billion down the drain in the first three quarters of this year alone. The autonomous vehicle division’s cars have been involved in several high-profile incidents, one of which involved a Cruise taxi dragging a pedestrian more than 20 feet.
That led the company to voluntarily halt operations across the country, but the feds are investigating Cruise’s business and technologies, which could drum up more headaches for the division.
[Image: Michael Vi via Shutterstock]
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