General Motors intends to market self-driving vehicles by the middle of the decade. We are not talking about means for use as a robotaxi but cars for personal use. This is what he said to Mary Barra, CEO of General Motors, speaking at CES 2022 in Las Vegas.
We are looking for further opportunities to extend fully autonomous vehicle technology to personal transportation with the safety and quality our consumers expect, and with state-of-the-art autonomous vehicle technology that will transform the ownership experience as we know it.
GM and Cruise are gaining significant technology skills and experience and are working to be the fastest on the market with a personal autonomous vehicle. Indeed, we aim to deliver our first personal autonomous vehicles by the middle of the decade.
Very interesting and above all ambitious goal. Cruise, as we know, he is working on self-driving electric vehicles for passenger transport services. Mary Barra, however, talks about cars for personal use. Unfortunately, the CEO did not provide further details on this ambitious project. We, therefore, do not know what type of vehicle the manufacturer intends to sell, in which markets it will be marketed, what its real level of autonomous driving will be (here we explain what they are), and how GM will behave in the event of accidents.
Currently, there are no vehicles on the market equipped with true autonomous driving for personal use. The companies operating in this sector are working on automated vehicles only for passenger transport services and in any case in “controlled” environments.
Experts agree that in the future autonomous vehicles will also arrive for private individuals, but there is talk of a very distant future. General Motors, on the other hand, has decided to set a specific date and quite close too. However, it is not the first time that the CEO has talked about autonomous vehicles for private use. Last May he said he was thinking about the possibility of selling vehicles equipped with Cruise technology to private individuals.
All that remains is to wait to better understand how this ambitious General Motors project will evolve.