GM aiming to drive the future of self-driving cars
THE chief executive of General Motors, an automaker synonymous with Detroit, saw the future of driving not in the Motor City but on the streets of San Francisco.
Mary T Barra, a GM lifer who had worked her way from engineer to the top, was in the back seat of a prototype self-driving electric car as it wound its way through the city’s downtown a year ago.
She wanted to see for herself whether automation was ready to take over from a driver – safely, and on a mass scale. How would it react, for example, when it reached an intersection as a light turned yellow?
Driving in a situation like that, “you have to make a decision”, she recalled in a recent interview.
“Generally if you decide to go, you decide to speed up. Or you stop.” If the technology works, she said, it will make the right decision: “The car knows.”
After that drive, Barra made her own decision to speed up, convinced that such cars were worth betting the company on.
Within six months after what she called her “aha! moment” in San Francisco, a fleet of selfdriving Chevrolet Bolts, the company’s new electric car, was being built at a GM assembly plant in Michigan, the pace accelerated at the direction of Barra and her senior management team.
It was a first for any major car company, and the first leg of a race she is determined to win. The question now is whether a company identified with the industry’s bygone glory days can be a trendsetter in 21st-century transportation – and beat out Silicon Valley rivals like Google, Tesla and Uber with no legacy business to encumber them.
“The auto industry is on the cusp of significant change, and GM has to prove that a longtime established player can be up to the task,” said Michelle Krebs, a senior analyst with the carshopping site Autotrader, who has followed the company since the 1980s.
“If you look at their past performance, their record has been spotty at best.”
General Motors is making a big wager that it can succeed, shedding overseas operations while investing $600 million this year in self-driving cars and other advanced technologies. It spent $1 billion on Cruise Automation, a Silicon Valley startup that developed the driverless technology powering Barra’s ride in San Francisco.
It is a perilous challenge – balancing the demands of a global automotive business with an aggressive push into expensive high-tech models – that has already claimed victims. Last month, Ford Motor ousted its chief executive, Mark Fields, aiming to send a signal that it could keep pace.
But GM is making a case that it can be a leader in the auto industry of both today and tomorrow. “We are very, very serious and intent on putting something on the road,” Barra said of the company’s automated vehicles. “We definitely want to be first.”