GM unveils its driverless cars

Automaker aspires to become leader of pack.

SAN FRANCISCO — For more than a year, General Motors has tantalized investors with plans to build its future around self-driving cars.

It has regularly announced big investments and progress reports, but the company has kept its prototype vehicles largely under wraps — until now.

GM is now demonstrating its growing fleet of computer-operated, battery-powered Chevrolet Bolts in San Francisco to dozens of investment analysts, who are eager to evaluate the automaker’s advanced test vehicles.

The event represents a critical step for GM as it seeks to establish leadership in the hotly contested race to bring driverless cars to market.

And although GM has been reluctant to show off the cars it has developed through a subsidiary, Cruise Automation, the company now wants to prove that self-driving models are getting closer to general use.

“Everything we are doing is geared to speed,” GM’s president, Daniel Ammann, told journalists at an event showcasing the cars last week.

To emphasize the company’s progress, Ammann said the cars would be ready for consumer applications in “quarters, not years.”

Meeting that goal would probably give GM, the nation’s largest automaker, a jump on other companies developing self-driving models.

Industry analysts say autonomous vehicles could generate billions of dollars in additional revenue and profit for automakers and technology companies, primarily by selling or leasing them to ride-hailing services, taxi fleets and delivery companies.

For GM, the self-driving program is a cornerstone to long-term growth that is not dependent on simply selling vehicles to individual drivers.

“GM has changed the narrative of the company’s future,” Adam Jonas, a Morgan Stanley analyst, said in a research report Tuesday.

Other automakers, such as Ford Motor, Volkswagen and Toyota, are pushing to accelerate their own electric and autonomous-vehicle programs.

The field is also crowded with competitors from Silicon Valley, such as Google, Apple, Uber and the electric-carmaker Tesla.

GM has a blend of financial resources, automotive experience and management resolve that position it strongly to compete with other automakers and big tech companies. But it also has a legacy of failures to overcome — none bigger than its collapse into bankruptcy in 2009.

The leadership of the company’s chief executive, Mary T. Barra, was tested soon after she took over in 2014 when it was revealed that GM had produced millions of small cars equipped with faulty ignitions responsible for 124 deaths.

The scandal slowed GM’s comeback, but it also galvanized its executives to focus on making its cars safer, and ultimately to pursue development of fully autonomous vehicles.

“GM is a much more entrepreneurial company now than it’s ever been,” said David E. Cole, chairman emeritus of the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor, Michigan. “That has happened since the bankruptcy — the fact they are no longer wedded to doing things the way they did in the past.”

In the summer of 2015, Barra and other senior GM executives began a series of visits to California, to study advances in self-driving cars and to scout potential partners in developing autonomous models.

In addition to observing how companies like Google were developing driverless technology, the executives became acquainted with work being done by Cruise Automation, a tiny startup working out of a San Francisco warehouse.

By February of last year, officials decided that if GM was serious about the race to build the car of the future, it had to move quickly — or risk falling further behind.