Adding insult to injury! General Motors' autonomous driving department's valuation was halved following the shattering of "Apple's car-making dream."

Zhitong App has learned that the internal stock price of Cruise, an autonomous driving car company under General Motors, has dropped by more than half compared to a quarter ago, due to the ongoing impact of an accident in October last year. According to an email, Cruise employees were informed that a third party estimated their stock price at $11.80, which is lower than the previous estimate of $24.27 a quarter ago. A source mentioned that after Apple (AAPL.US) announced the cancellation of its decade-long electric car development plan this week, Cruise's valuation was subsequently downgraded.

In an email, Cruise CEO Craig Glidden stated, "We cannot ignore that this estimate is much lower than what we have seen before, which affects the reality of each of us."

Cruise has been striving to recover from the October accident, where a woman was hit by a human-driven car and then dragged by a Cruise autonomous vehicle causing a secondary accident. The company's operating permit in California was suspended, and Cruise has ceased all testing on public roads in the United States.

Glidden mentioned that Cruise still has a long way to go to achieve large-scale commercialization. The company had planned to launch autonomous taxis in nearly a dozen cities in the U.S. last year but later laid off a quarter of its workforce, with the CEO, co-founder, and other employees resigning.

These past few months have been very challenging for Cruise, once seen as having boundless prospects. General Motors announced last month a cut of about $1 billion from Cruise's annual budget and released a shocking safety analysis report on the October crash, which indicated that executives had withheld important data from regulatory agencies, the media, and the public. Several U.S. government agencies, including the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Department of Justice (DOJ), and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), are investigating the company.

According to insiders, Cruise aims to gradually reintroduce human drivers to city streets later this year, possibly in Houston or Dallas. However, as reported last month, Cruise executives told some engineering and operations staff in recent internal meetings not to expect to see robot taxis on city streets again before the fourth quarter.

A spokesperson for Cruise stated that the new valuation reflects "the current market conditions and our operational reality," adding that the company is focused on "earning the trust of regulatory agencies and the public before restarting."