General Motors Co. (NYSE: GM) is suing San Francisco over $108 million in taxes it says it was unfairly charged over seven years, according to a lawsuit filed Friday and first reported by Bloomberg.
The Detroit-based automaker says the city used the San Francisco presence of its self-driving technology subsidiary, Cruise LLC, to tax the entire enterprise based on GM's global revenue of $3 billion instead of its locally generated revenue. It is also seeking to recover an additional $13 million in interest it paid on the larger sum.
“GM’s core automotive business does not employ anyone in the city, has no plants or other physical locations in the city, has no dealerships in the city, and sells only a de minimis amount of retail goods (approximately $677,000 in 2022) in the city,” GM said in the suit filed in San Francisco Superior Court.
The company argues that Cruise is a wholly separate entity from GM and only generates a small amount of revenue.
Cruise, headquartered in San Francisco, formerly had a considerable presence in the city, but had its permits to operate driverless vehicles pulled by the state's regulator after a crash with a pedestrian that resulted in an injury. Before getting its permits pulled it had been taking fares from customers for a few months. It laid off a substantial portion of its workforce and parted ways with a number of top executives in the wake of the regulatory pushback.
