How GM is trying to get ahead of an automobile revolution
Auto giants aren’t waiting for consumers to demand electric and self-driving vehicles
Can automakers walk and chew gum at the same time?
That’s the challenge facing the world’s giants. How General Motors and Ford to Volkswagen, Toyota and Hyundai invest billions of dollars and countless hours of engineering and design talent in electric and self-driving vehicles they won’t sell in meaningful numbers for years and simultaneously develop worldclass cars and trucks customers will want until the mobility revolution comes, if it ever does? GM may be showing the way, as it moves toward the goal of having electric-powered autonomous vehicles in commercial service somewhere in the United States this year and selling a wide range of EVs around the world in the near future.
GM’s approach:
Pay less attention to vehicles people don’t care about — the automaking equivalent of Elmore Leonard’s famous instruction to writers: “Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.” Ceasing to build slow-selling, low-profit vehicles such as the Chevy Cruze and Impala frees resources for other things;
Split product development into two channels: One focused on vehicles that will be built in high numbers for the next few years, the other on vehicles and technologies that will hit their stride later;
Eliminate the long-standing engine and transmission development group and make its responsibilities part of vehicle engineering, a change that looks minor from the outside, but constituted a seismic shift within GM.
“Things happen when you focus on them,” said Pam Fletcher, who led the program that created the Chevy Bolt electric car and Cadillac Super Cruise semi-autonomous driving system before assuming the new title of vice-president for global innovation a few months ago.
“Our absolute intention is to commercialize these things. It’s not invention for invention’s sake. We’ve only been public about a fraction of what we’re doing.” At the same time, human-driven cars powered by internal combustion engines accounted for 95 per cent of the 8.4 million vehicles GM sold around the world last year. They pay the bills.
Moving engine and transmission development — Global Powertrain Operations in GM Speak — to GM’s main tech centre in Warren Mich., eliminated bureaucracy and duplication of efforts that cost time and talent, said Ken Morris, vice-president of GM’s global product group.
Combine that with the work saved by dropping slow-selling vehicles and GM can tackle new challenges such as batteries, electric motors and self-driving cars.
While electric and autonomous vehicles are profoundly different from today’s vehicles, they share many parts and systems, Fletcher points out.
“We share systems across platforms,” Fletcher said.
No automaker can afford to be last into the new vehicle types, but nor can any afford to ignore what buyers want today.
“We have a large portfolio and a large customer base,” Fletcher said. “We’re going to build a lot of kinds of vehicles for a long time.”