G.M. Unveils Its Driverless Cars, Aiming to Lead the Pack
G.M. Unveils Its Driverless Cars, Aiming to Lead the Pack
By BILL VLASIC NOV. 29, 2017
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.
On Thursday, G.M. will demonstrate 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 G.M. as it seeks
to establish leadership in the hotly contested race to bring driverless cars to
market.
And although G.M. 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,” G.M.’s
president, Daniel Ammann, told journalists at an event showcasing the cars on
Tuesday.
To emphasize the company’s progress, Mr. Ammann said the
cars would be ready for consumer applications in “quarters, not years.”
Meeting that goal would probably give G.M., 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 G.M., the self-driving program is a cornerstone to
long-term growth that is not dependent on simply selling vehicles to individual
drivers.
“G.M. has changed the narrative of the company’s future,”
Adam Jonas, a Morgan Stanley analyst, said in a research report on 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-car maker Tesla.
G.M. 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
G.M. had produced millions of small cars equipped with faulty ignitions
responsible for 124 deaths.
The scandal slowed G.M.’s comeback, but it also
galvanized its executives to focus on making its cars safer, and ultimately to
pursue development of fully autonomous vehicles.
“G.M. 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, Mich. “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, Ms. Barra and other senior G.M.
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 start-up working out of a San Francisco
warehouse.
By February of last year, officials decided that if G.M.
was serious about the race to build the car of the future, it had to move
quickly — or risk falling further behind.
“We had to be very honest with ourselves,” Mr. Ammann
recalled recently. “There were some capabilities we did not have and that we
needed to have if we really wanted to pursue this.”
And it was up to Mr. Ammann — an industry outsider born
in New Zealand who worked as a Wall Street investment banker before joining
G.M. — to deliver the crucial piece.
He concluded that the perfect match was Cruise, which had
fewer than 40 employees but was moving quickly to retrofit basic cars with its
self-driving equipment.
“What they brought us was exactly what we were missing,”
Mr. Ammann said.
Kyle Vogt, Cruise’s co-founder and software guru, said
that he had been intrigued by G.M.’s interest, but hesitant to rush into a
partnership with a huge, century-old automaker from Detroit.
But after several one-on-one meetings with Mr. Ammann, he
became convinced that G.M.’s manufacturing expertise could greatly advance
Cruise’s mission.
“Dan said to me, ‘You want to take the chaos off the
roads by introducing this great technology — can you really deny that we would
get there much faster working together?’ ” Mr. Vogt said.
Mr. Vogt had learned the pitfalls of trying to adapt
mainstream cars with expensive cameras, sensors and electronic equipment for
use on public roadways. Converting a handful of such vehicles was a challenge.
Producing fleets of them seemed beyond Cruise’s abilities.
“You don’t see any start-ups building iPhones,” he said.
After G.M. purchased Cruise for an estimated $1 billion
in cash, stock and incentive packages, the companies began installing computers
and other equipment in all-electric Chevy Bolts as they came off the assembly
line at the automaker’s plant in suburban Detroit.
While Cruise began expanding its San Francisco operation
to what is now nearly 400 employees, G.M. set up a team of hundreds of
engineers at its technical center in Warren, Mich., to support the self-driving
program.
A G.M. vice president, Doug Parks, was assigned to work
daily with Mr. Vogt and his California team. Together, they designed
self-driving Bolts to the safety and quality standards that G.M. applied to its
regular cars, trucks and sport utility vehicles.
“We are working fast and furiously,” said Mr. Parks, an
engineer who has worked for G.M. for 33 years. “It is super exciting, and I
love what the company is becoming.”
So far, the partnership between G.M. and Cruise has
produced about 180 autonomous Bolts, which are constantly being tested in San
Francisco, as well as in Arizona and Michigan. The company plans to begin tests
in Manhattan early next year.
Mr. Vogt is keen to prove that self-driving models can
navigate complex urban environments such as downtown San Francisco, rather than
just highways and suburban streets.
On Tuesday, journalists from news organizations including
The New York Times were given rides in the demonstration models.
For 20 minutes, the self-driving Bolts traversed the
hilly, narrow and congested streets of the city’s Dogpatch neighborhood —
stopping for pedestrians, slowing to pass double-parked vehicles, navigating
gently away from bicycles.
A Cruise employee was behind the steering wheel, ready to
assume control of the car if it misjudged traffic or was headed for a
collision. But during a reporter’s ride, no driver intervention was required.
The car traveled more slowly than driver-operated
vehicles on the road, and seemed to exercise extreme caution rounding corners
or avoiding obstacles. Yet it covered more than two miles without a hitch,
despite encountering what its onboard computer said were 265 people, 49
bicycles and 489 cars.
Mr. Ammann beamed when details of the test ride were
shared, declaring, “This technology is coming along faster than anyone thinks.”
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