CES 2022: GM Aims for First Delivery of Personal Autonomous Vehicle by Mid-Decade

LAS VEGAS, January 5, 2022 – Historic vehicle manufacturer General Motors is gunning to be the first company to market for personal autonomous vehicles, with a goal of delivering the first one of its kind by the middle of this decade, its CEO said Wednesday.

“We are working to be the fastest to market with a retail personal autonomous vehicle,” Mary Barra said at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. “In fact, we aim to deliver our first personal autonomous vehicle as soon as the middle of this decade.”

GM touted its Cruise subsidiary, a self-driving company based in San Francisco, as the mechanism that will drive its vision. The company introduced a range of vehicles Wednesday that utilizes both driver-assist technology – where the car can drive itself but requires the driver behind the wheel – and driverless technology. It noted its commercial relationships with a flex of its partnerships with Walmart and FedEx on vehicles with advanced technologies and teased luxury prototypes of vehicles with fully autonomous features and a focus on comfort.

Barra said the company hopes to not only corner the commercial and individual market, but the rideshare and delivery spaces as well – which could disrupt an industry (Uber and Lyft) that itself disrupted another (taxis).

“We expect that Cruise will be the first to enable large-scale commercial autonomous experience for both ride-share and delivery, and we are looking further down the road at opportunities to extend fully autonomous vehicle technology to personal transportation,” Barra said.

“We believe GM and Cruise have the technology, expertise and scale to capture both the advanced driver-assist and driverless AV market opportunities before anyone else.”

The automobile industry is quickly moving toward electric vehicles and adapting to a new environment where Teslas, which already can do many driving functions by itself, are the norm.

What’s left to ponder is the external circumstances surrounding acceptance of fully autonomous cars, once thought to be many more years away from conception. Those circumstances include public trust in the vehicles and, more critically, regulatory hurdles that such a market faces to convince lawmakers of its acceptability.