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“Fisker Incurs Financial Miscalculations: Customer Payments Go Unaccounted For Over Several Months”

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Fisker temporarily lost track of millions of dollars in customer payments as it scaled up deliveries, leading to an internal audit that started in December and took months to complete, TechCrunch has learned. The EV startup was ultimately able to track down a majority of those payments or request new ones from customers whose payment methods had expired. Red flags raisedFisker has warned investors since last year about problems with its internal accounting practices. Fisker’s poor internal procedures have created problems beyond keeping track of payments. Fisker hired contractors in February to help resolve the title and registration problems, but the backlog was immense, according to the people.

GitHub’s Enterprise Copilot Reaches General Release

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GitHub today announced the general availability of Copilot Enterprise, the $39/month version of its code completion tool and developer-centric chatbot for large businesses. Many teams already keep their documentation in GitHub repositories today, making it relatively easy for Copilot to reason over it. On top of talking about today’s release, I also asked Dohmke about his high-level thinking of where Copilot is going next. “Different use cases require different models. We will continue going down that path of using the best models for the different pieces of the Copilot experience,” Dohmke said.

Cruise unveils government investigations and internal report on pedestrian collision

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Cruise lost the permits it needed to operate commercially in the state of California and has since grounded its fleet elsewhere. Problems with Cruise began almost immediately after the company received the last remaining permit required to operate its robotaxi service commercially throughout San Francisco. On that day, a pedestrian crossing a street in San Francisco was initially hit by a human-driven car and landed in the path of a Cruise robotaxi and run over. Even after obtaining the Full Video, Cruise did not correct the public narrative but continued instead to share incomplete facts and video about the Accident with the media and the public. This conduct has caused both regulators and the media to accuse Cruise of misleading them.”This story is developing …

“Unveiling the Truth: Uncovering Reluctance to Safeguard Children in Unredacted Meta Documents”

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Internal Meta documents about child safety have been unsealed as part of a lawsuit filed by the New Mexico Department of Justice against both Meta and its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg. The documents reveal that Meta not only intentionally marketed its messaging platforms to children, but also knew about the massive volume of inappropriate and sexually explicit content being shared between adults and minors. “For years, Meta employees tried to sound the alarm about how decisions made by Meta executives subjected children to dangerous solicitations and child exploitation,” Torrez continued. Meta’s acknowledgement of the child safety issues on its platform is particularly damning. When including reports from Instagram (5 million) and WhatsApp (1 million), Meta platforms are responsible for about 85% of all reports made to NCMEC.

Internal documents reveal EV startup Fisker’s struggle to meet sales targets

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Fisker remains far from meeting CEO and founder Henrik Fisker’s publicly stated goal of delivering 300 electric SUVs per day globally, according to internal documents viewed by TechCrunch. The EV startup spent much of December aiming to meet an internal sales goal of between 100 and 200 vehicles a day in North America, where the bulk of its inventory and sales efforts are. Fisker is delivering its SUVs in a number of European countries, and contract manufacturer Magna Steyr builds them in Austria. Henrik Fisker told The Wall Street Journal on Thursday that the lack of a physical footprint has harmed sales here. The slow pace of deliveries has widened the gulf between the amount of Fisker Ocean SUVs being produced by Magna and the number sold.

Leader cruise expelled after preliminary inquiry into robotaxi crisis

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Cruise spokesperson Erik Moser confirmed the departures and shared a statement, but declined to comment on whether these employees were fired. “Today, following an initial analysis of the October 2 incident and Cruise’s response to it, nine individuals departed Cruise. A video, which TechCrunch viewed a day after the incident, showed the robotaxi braking aggressively and coming to a stop over the woman. Morale at Cruise has been low since the October 2 incident, with employees pointing the finger at poor management that didn’t prioritize safety at the company. Initial layoffs affected contract workers who had jobs cleaning, charging and maintaining the vehicles as well as answering customer support inquiries.

Initial safety investigation results in dismissal of robotaxi accident leadership

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Cruise spokesperson Erik Moser confirmed the departures and shared a statement, but declined to comment on whether these employees were fired. “Today, following an initial analysis of the October 2 incident and Cruise’s response to it, nine individuals departed Cruise. A video, which TechCrunch viewed a day after the incident, showed the robotaxi braking aggressively and coming to a stop over the woman. Morale at Cruise has been low since the October 2 incident, with employees pointing the finger at poor management that didn’t prioritize safety at the company. Initial layoffs affected contract workers who had jobs cleaning, charging and maintaining the vehicles as well as answering customer support inquiries.

Robotaxi Accident Prompts Removal of Cruise Executives

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Cruise spokesperson Erik Moser confirmed the departures and shared a statement, but declined to comment on whether these employees were fired. “Today, following an initial analysis of the October 2 incident and Cruise’s response to it, nine individuals departed Cruise. A video, which TechCrunch viewed a day after the incident, showed the robotaxi braking aggressively and coming to a stop over the woman. Morale at Cruise has been low since the October 2 incident, with employees pointing the finger at poor management that didn’t prioritize safety at the company. Initial layoffs affected contract workers who had jobs cleaning, charging and maintaining the vehicles as well as answering customer support inquiries.