The safety chief of GM's Cruise robotaxi unit is a former Ford and Apple executive who was hired after a crash.

The troubled autonomous vehicle unit, Cruise, has appointed a veteran automotive and technology company safety official as its chief safety officer.

Steve Kenner, with over nearly four decades of experience in top safety positions at various companies, began his new role at Cruise on Monday, the company announced.

He has held leadership positions at Apple, Uber, and Aurora, a company that produces hardware and software for self-driving trucks.

As an engineer at General Motors, Kenner began his career and later served as global safety director at Ford, his crosstown rival.

A Cruise robotaxi drags a San Francisco pedestrian roughly 20 feet (6 meters) to the curb at roughly 7 miles per hour (11 kilometers per hour), four months after the incident, and he comes to Cruise at a pivotal time.

The California Public Utilities Commission accused Cruise of concealing information about the crash for over two weeks after granting it a permit to operate an all-day fleet of self-driving taxis in San Francisco in August.

The suspension of Cruise's license to operate its driverless fleet in California, triggered by an incident, led to a purge of its leadership and layoffs that eliminated about a quarter of its workforce, as GM scaled back its self-driving technology ambitions.

The new management team at Cruise, which was put in place by General Motors after the October incident, admitted that they did not fully inform the regulators.

"Collaboration among all teams within a company is crucial for ensuring safety, with regulators being an integral part of this partnership. I am eager to gain their trust," Kenner stated.