Waymo, Google's self-driving car company, cuts jobs across multiple departments

According to media reports, a week after Google's parent company Alphabet announced the layoffs, its independent self-driving technology company Waymo laid off some employees, involving multiple departments.

Not long ago, Alphabet laid off 6% of its global workforce, about 12,000 people, including part of the Waymo team.

It's unclear how many Waymo employees will be affected, which Waymo said will be a "limited number." From engineers working on perception and motion control to recruiters to fleet and vehicle technicians, everyone has been let go, according to posts by former employees. Waymo is terminating its trucking program, Waymo Via, a source familiar with the matter said. In addition, employees posted that many of the affected employees were developing "Husky," which they said was the code name for Waymo Via.

Waymo has denied that it is shutting down Via, saying it remains fully committed to expanding its freight solution. A spokesperson confirmed that Waymo is pulling back slightly on its deployment of fully autonomous delivery trucks. Waymo will continue to develop its "Driver" in a way that applies to all lines of business, including a highway feature that can be applied to both ride-hailing and trucking, the spokesperson said.

It is understood that Waymo has 2,500 employees, the company with the largest number of Alphabet sideline projects. The unit generates barely enough revenue to cover its huge losses, which include the cost of developing proprietary hardware such as lidar, machine learning models used to train "drivers" and cloud computing costs to analyze data captured by vehicles.