G.M. Unveils Its Driverless Cars, Aiming to Lead the Pack
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.
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.
“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.
“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.
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.
