Americans spent about 95 billion hours behind the wheel last year, traveling something like 2.76 trillion miles. On Wednesday, General Motors executives are outlining the future of automotive at the company’s annual GM Forward event in New York City, and they say their goal isn’t to reduce that number. After all, it’s a car company.
But GM does want to make car time better. Or, as Chief Product Officer Sterling Anderson put it in an interview with WIRED, “make it more productive, make it more relaxing, make it more engaging. We’d like to make your vehicle a more central, more useful part of your life than it has been historically.” Your future car is sort of a personal assistant, and sort of a spouse, and sort of a tool, and sort of a best friend.
It’s a tall order. But in a raft of announcements this week, GM hopes to demonstrate that, armed with AI-enabled capabilities, the automaker is inching closer to that future.
GM says it will roll out a new in-car AI assistant, called OnStar AI, starting with 2027 Cadillac Lyriqs. (The name borrows from the 30-year-old roadside assistance and security service, which has 12 million subscribers.) Paired with a new app, the system will start by letting drivers, for example, turn on their air conditioning with a voice command without navigating through a menu. Eventually, though, it might coordinate kid pickups and drop-offs depending on which spouse’s car is closer, Anderson says.
Courtesy of General Motors
GM also says it will use AI to speed up new-vehicle development, eventually cutting its four- to five-year development time in half—the speed at which Chinese carmakers create new vehicles today.
The automaker plans to expand its “eyes-off” highway driving technology to its most popular cars, inching closer to its years-old promise of making a personal self-driving car. It previously said the system was coming to the Cadillac Escalade IQ in 2028. Today, the company’s Super Cruise feature lets drivers take their hands off their steering wheels on hundreds of thousands of miles of pre-mapped highways. Reaching true autonomy will take time, but GM isn’t ready to talk about that publicly. “This industry is rife with promises that were not fulfilled. I am not keen on making them,” Anderson says.
But GM is taking a different approach from, say, Tesla. The electric carmaker sells a driver-assistance feature called “Full Self-Driving (Supervised)” that can navigate many highways and local roads but requires drivers to stay alert and ready to take over at any moment. That kind of system “presents the illusion of autonomy without its benefits,” Anderson says, who for a time led Tesla’s Autopilot program. If drivers can’t do other things while their car is doing most of the driving, it’s less useful and “comes with the direct expense of the safety of your vehicle and the people around you,” he says. “That would not be a responsible way to operate.”
Courtesy of General Motors
GM’s method, by contrast, is to slowly expand “eyes-off” capabilities to more sorts of roads, letting drivers text or eat or watch YouTube first on some highways, and then on more highways, and then on local roads, and then maybe everywhere.
That’s when the automaker's vision gets bigger and blurrier. The cabin, the company says in a blog post, can become a space to “relax, work, and unwind. … In time, this will pave the way for a future where your car can take on everyday errands,” the company says. The personal self-driving car will pick up groceries, drop off children, and then maybe even find a parking spot at the end.
Urban planners and infrastructure experts have worried about this vision. If you lower the price of a car trip, in money and time spent driving, won’t everyone send their cars out for every task? Won’t the roads be crowded with pods full of people sleeping, emailing, and YouTubing while their vehicles slowly pilot them onward—or worse, cars with no one in them? Won’t cities become sprawlier?
Anderson says yes. If you have cheap, personal driving robots, “you will very likely incur more of those robots on the roads. And so there's a lot of societal and infrastructural considerations to make here,” he says. But he argues we have time, and that cities take time to sprawl. “I wouldn't call this an imminent thing, but it certainly is something we should be thinking about.”