- At an investor briefing, GM promised “hands-off, eyes-off” self-driving starting in 2028.
- The idea isn’t new, but executives offered new specifics.
You wrap up the last meeting, pack your bags, and walk out of the office. Your truck pulls up under the awning to pick you up. You climb into the driver’s seat, click the button for home, check that the truck picked up the ingredients for tonight’s dinner, and sit back to read the news on your phone while the truck drives you home.
A vision of 2040? No. A vision of 2028, according to General Motors.
At a briefing for investors this week, GM executives outlined their plans for a future of autonomous cars. It’s nearer, they said, than many Americans might think.
Cars That Drive Themselves With or Without Passengers
- The plan includes fully autonomous cars that can drive themselves with and without passengers.
“Our vision is to build vehicles that can drive themselves or their occupants anywhere they need to be,” the company says in a press release.
“This includes a future where your vehicle can handle mundane tasks for you, like heading out into bumper-to-bumper traffic to pick up groceries or dry cleaning, giving you valuable time back.”
It expands on the Super Cruise system that some GM vehicles have today. Today’s Super Cruise can handle accelerating, braking, steering, and changing lanes on more than 750,000 miles of pre-mapped highways. It needs a driver paying constant attention, ready to take over at any moment.
In the future, GM says, it won’t. It will work on surface streets, not just highways.
From Many Chips to One
- GM is one of many automakers changing how they build technology, going to one high-powered computer “brain” in cars.
The plan, GM says, “requires a radical departure from traditional automotive electronics.”
Traditionally, automakers have littered car designs with hundreds of low-powered computer chips, each responsible for just a few simple tasks. One might control the logic of opening and closing windows. Another might manage cabin temperature.
This has left them vulnerable to supply-chain shocks. When a microchip shortage hit in 2022, chip manufacturers focused on making more profitable, high-power chips. That left automakers scrambling to find the cheap chips they needed. Some stripped features from vehicles to keep factories running.
Now, GM says, it will build cars around a single high-powered computing unit with “enough headroom to support the AI and autonomy experiences we’re building toward.”
Starting on High-End Models, Coming to Best-Sellers
- It will first appear on the Cadillac Escalade IQ, then make its way into higher-selling models.
The tech will appear, the company says, “beginning in 2028 with the Cadillac Escalade IQ.
GM has promised that date before.
An extraordinary but rare vehicle, the Escalade IQ is an all-electric take on the popular Cadillac Escalade. It’s longer, taller, faster, and fancier in every way – and it sells slowly. That should make it a good test platform for the company to work out kinks in the tech.
From there, GM says, it will expand “to our highest-volume, best-selling vehicle lineups, including full-size SUVs and light-duty pickups.”
