Tag: gm’s
NHTSA opens probe into GM’s autonomous driving technology
The National Highway Transportation Safety Administration announced Thursday that it is opening an investigation into the self-driving technology behind General Motors’ robotaxi fleet. This announcement follows three reported accidents allegedly caused by Cruise vehicles braking hard or otherwise becoming immobilized in traffic, creating unannounced obstacles for other vehicles and resulting in rear-end collisions with other motorists.
“With respect to the incidents of hard braking, NHTSA has received three reports of the ADS initiating a hard braking maneuver in response to another road user that was quickly approaching from the rear,” the agency reports, noting that human supervisors were aboard for each incident. “In each case, the other road user subsequently struck the rear of the ADS-equipped vehicle.”
“With respect to the incidents of vehicle immobilization, NHTSA has been notified of multiple reports involving Cruise ADS equipped vehicles, operating without onboard human supervision, becoming immobilized,” the report continues. “When this occurs, the vehicle may strand vehicle passengers in unsafe locations, such as lanes of travel or intersections, and become an unexpected obstacle to other road users.”
In response the company touted its technology’s history of safe operations. “Cruise’s safety record is publicly reported and includes having driven nearly 700,000 fully autonomous miles in an extremely complex urban environment with zero life-threatening injuries or fatalities,” Hannah Lindow, Cruise spokesperson, told Engadget via email. “This is against the backdrop of over 40,000 deaths each year on American roads. There’s always a balance between healthy regulatory scrutiny and the innovation we desperately need to save lives, which is why we’ll continue to fully cooperate with NHTSA or any regulator in achieving that shared goal.”
The company goes on to argue that in the cases of hard braking, the vehicles were reacting to the actions of other drivers, had a human operator onboard (though the ADS was in control at the time), and has already met with the NHTSA regarding each incident. Cruise frames the immobilization events as equivalent to a flat tire, wherein the ADS encounters an unexpected and potentially dangerous situation, turns on the vehicle’s hazards and pulls off to the side of the road.
Cruise LLC is headquartered in San Francisco and was founded in 2013 by Kyle Vogt and Dan Kan. GM acquired the autonomous driving technology company three years later. Since then, General Motors has lavished its subsidiary with funding, facilities and staffing, even going so far as to develop its own processor chips for the Origin autonomous shuttle bus. The company began testing ADS rides in San Francisco in June, 2021 and earlier this year earned regulatory approval to charge for driverless taxi services within the city.
The company has also suffered setbacks in its pursuit of self-driving taxis. Division CEO Dan Ammann stepped down from his position in June, replaced for the interim by CTO and founder Kyle Vogt. Cruise made headlines in April when a police officer tried and failed to pull one over during a traffic stop and again in June when seemingly all of them decided that the corner of Gough and Fulton would make for a perfect impromptu parking lot.
As the NHTSA is sure it’s aware of every braking/immobilization incident to date, the agency is opening a preliminary evaluation,”to determine the scope and severity of the potential problem and fully assess the potential safety-related issues posed by these two types of incidents.” It has not announced a timeline for publication of the PE’s findings.
Hitting the Books: The early EVs that paved the way for GM’s Ultium success
General Motors has been in business for more than a century, but in its 112 years, the company has never faced such challenges as it does in today’s rapidly electrifying and automating industry. The assembly line jobs from Detroit’s heyday have been replaced by legions of automated industrial arms, almost as quickly as the era of internal combustion engines has been supplanted by EVs. Since 2014, it’s been Mary Barra’s job as CEO of GM to help guide America’s largest automaker into the 21st century.
In Charging Ahead: GM, Mary Barra, and the Reinvention of an American Icon, author and Bloomberg automotive journalist, David Welch, recounts Barra’s Herculean efforts to reinvent a company that has been around since horses still pulled buggies, reimagine the brand’s most iconic models and bring EVs to the masses — all while being a woman in the highest echelons of a male dominated industry. In the excerpt below, Welch examines some of GM’s earliest electric initiatives, like the popular but short-lived EV1 or the loss leader Bolt, without which we likely wouldn’t have many of Ultium-based vehicle offerings.
Taken from Charging Ahead by David Welch. Copyright © 2022 by David Welch. Used by permission of HarperCollins Leadership, a division of HarperCollins Focus, LLC.
Battery-powered cars had captured the imagination of wealthy, tech-minded drivers. Tesla was the first to tap into that, becoming a hot brand in the process. Its cars began stealing customers away from the likes of Mercedes-Benz and BMW. But in 2017, when Barra was weighing up her own plug-in play, EVs were still only about 1 percent of car sales. They were still too expensive for most consumers and even at fat prices, they lost money. EVs sold by Tesla, GM, and Nissan could take hours to charge and only Tesla models could go more than 300 miles on a charge.
GM had been working on electric batteries and developing vehicles that would run on them. In no way was Barra flat-footed. But spending billions on cars with an uncertain group of buyers was seen as speculative and risky. Internally at major car companies, there were still voices saying that EVs were a costly science project. They assumed Tesla would run out of cash one day and carmakers could carry on as they always had.
Internally, GM was weighing uncertain demand for EV sales against the risk that Tesla and Germany’s Volkswagen group and even Ford would capture the buyers who made the switch. That threatened to completely reset customer loyalties and shake up the industry. Tesla already sold most of the electric vehicles on the market. Elon Musk threatened to upend the auto industry the way Apple’s iPhone did to ’90s mobile phone kingpins Nokia, Motorola, Ericsson, and Siemens. GM’s future hinged not only on Barra’s courage to make a move, but also on her being wise enough to get the timing right.
Caution was understandable. At the time, Tesla was by far the top seller of electric vehicles with 100,000 sold globally and losses of about $2 billion on sales of its Model S sedans and Model X SUVs. Those Teslas typically sold for more than $100,000 apiece, which is triple the price of the average gasburning family SUV. With Tesla’s $100,000 cars losing money the challenge for companies to make a buck selling EVs was daunting.
GM knew it all too well. In the 1990s, the company had sold the famous EV1, an aerodynamic two-seater priced at $34,000 that was leased to EV enthusiasts from 1996 to 1999. That was an expensive car back then. GM spent $1 billion developing it and would lose more money selling the vehicles, said [then-GM CEO G. Richard] Wagoner in an interview. I remember seeing a presentation for the car at the Detroit Auto Show in 1997. GM’s then vice chairman, Harry Pearce, talked about electric cars like the EV1 and also about hybrids that ran on gasoline engines and electric motors. For GM, it was a display of what the company’s engineers could do and a glimpse of the future, he told me. But it would be decades before it would be a real business.
The EV1 would bring GM serious credibility with environmentalists, but after leasing 1,100 of them, the company lost a lot of money. A few Hollywood actors like Ed Begley Jr. leased one and promoted it as often as he could. Francis Ford Coppola had one, and when GM ended the program and demanded that lessees return the cars, he refused to give it up and kept it. The company crushed all the cars that it had leased after retrieving them, which then made GM a pariah with the same environmentalists who loved the car.
The economics of electric cars weren’t very good twenty years later. Chevrolet started selling the Bolt in 2016 and lost a whopping $9,000 on every one of the $38,000 plug-in cars it sold. Before that, GM sold the Volt plug-in hybrid, which uses a gasoline engine and an electric motor in tandem to get forty-two miles per gallon. The Volt lost even more. Those nasty numbers would drive serious resistance to electric cars inside GM and at other major carmakers, too.
One big reason GM sold the Bolt was to meet government regulations. In California and a dozen coastal states that followed its lead, automakers had to sell electric vehicles or other super-efficient cars like hybrids to be able to sell their profitable gas guzzlers. Selling green vehicles earned ZEV credits. GM could also buy ZEV credits from Tesla, which many automakers did. But that just meant that they were helping fund Musk’s effort to eat their lunch.
In the EV race, Tesla already had the advantage of a tremendous amount of investor patience for Musk’s losses. Even though Tesla lost $2 billion that year, his company’s market capitalization ended 2017 with a total value of $52 billion. That was just $4 billion less than GM’s even though Barra brought in near record profits that year. In other words, the market would continue to fund Musk’s money-losing operation, but Barra had to fund her own vehicle development with profits from the very gas guzzlers she was seeking to replace.
That put GM and the mainstream car companies under pressure from three sides. Shareholders wanted profits from pickup trucks and sport utility vehicles. But in the car market, Tesla was stealing buyers, gaining a technological advantage in battery development, and building an Apple-like brand for making the cars of tomorrow. Meanwhile, governments were putting the squeeze on with new clean-air rules.
The Cadillac Celestiq is GM’s big (literally) luxury EV bet
Years ago, Cadillac was associated with luxury and performance. Today, in an effort to claw its way back to the top of the luxury heap, the U.S. automaker unveiled Monday the production Cadillac Celestiq, a hand-built, bespoke behemoth fastback sedan that adheres closely to the concept it unveiled in July of this year. The vehicle, […]
The Cadillac Celestiq is GM’s big (literally) luxury EV bet by Abigail Bassett originally published on TechCrunch