GM aims to leapfrog rivals with new generation of autonomous cars

A top candidate to become GM’s next chief executive said the company’s future lies in autonomous vehicles that will help it leapfrog global rivals, including from China.

In an interview with the FT, Sterling Anderson, a former Tesla executive charged with overseeing GM’s next generation of electric and autonomous vehicles, outlined a vision for autonomous vehicles that can ferry people to work but also pick up their shopping for them when they are at the office. He said he believed people would still prefer to own their own cars rather than rely on a robotaxi service.

“There’s a degree of autonomy inherent to owning the car,” said Anderson, who oversaw development of Tesla’s first autonomous systems and founded autonomous driving start-up Aurora Innovation before he was poached by GM chief executive Mary Barra last year. “You’re not at the whims of a network. You’re not waiting for someone or something else to send you something. It’s your car.”

Companies including Waymo, Tesla and Amazon-owned Zoox are operating fully autonomous robotaxi services in a limited number of cities in the US. But for personal use, most traditional manufacturers, including GM, only offer so-called Level 2 plus capabilities — technology that still requires active monitoring by a human driver behind the wheel.

The technological barriers and development costs are significantly higher for developing a “Level 4” system for personal use, which enables autonomous vehicles to drive themselves with no human behind the wheel.

Some manufacturers, including GM’s Detroit rival Ford, are focused on introducing “Level 3” autonomy, in which a vehicle drives itself but a human driver must be ready to take over.

But Anderson said Level 3 was a bad solution, as it was based on “unreasonable expectations” that a distracted human could assume control at a moment’s notice. Instead, GM plans to fully introduce autonomous Level 4 driving on highways for its Cadillac Escalade IQ model by 2028 before expanding it to other truck and SUV models, and incrementally to other kinds of roads.

While that is a different approach to robotaxi companies testing and operating in specific cities, “technologically, we’re all aimed at the same end point, which is to say self-driving anywhere, anytime”, he said. Asked if GM would enter the robotaxi business once it had reached that point, he responded: “I’m not making any announcements, but there would be nothing stopping us.”

Anderson appeared at a GM event in New York on Wednesday to announce a drive to cut GM’s development cycle in half from its current level of four to five years, using AI and machine learning to slash the time and effort for testing and research and development. Its new engineering approach will be used to build a dedicated EV platform using lithium manganese-rich batteries.

“For decades, designers passed sketches to engineers who handed blueprints to manufacturers,” said Anderson. “We’re replacing this relay race, this entire sequential process, with a new operating system built on large-scale data.”

He noted that as America’s largest auto company, GM’s “treasure trove” of manufacturing data gave it an edge over the kinds of autonomous driving start-ups he used to be involved in — and that this was a “huge part” of his decision to work for a Detroit manufacturer.

“I could start another robotics company, or I could leverage the data, the knowhow, the wherewithal, the resources of a company that’s already profitable and spins off this data every single day.”

US automakers are presently shielded from direct Chinese competition by steep tariffs and national security restrictions. Detroit automakers are also benefiting from the Trump administration’s gutting of emissions restrictions, allowing for a boom in sales of large trucks and SUVs. But critics caution the short-term reprieve risks the US auto industry falling further behind European and Asian rivals.

Anderson responded: “What do you suggest, we take our ball and go home, or do we invest in leapfrog opportunities?” The answer, he said, was “let’s go invest in the next wave. Let’s build the next-generation EV platform that nobody else can do right now, not even the Chinese.”

Additional reporting by Rafe Rosner-Uddin in San Francisco