// ARS TECHNICA — INTELLIGENZA ARTIFICIALE
Forget "Malaise 2.0," GM says it's still all-in on EVs and autonomy
General Motors’ plans will require quite a lot of customers’ trust.
It’s easy to criticize US automakers and their tepid approach to electric vehicles under the current administration and the expiration of the EV tax credit. It’s also easy to look at the rest of the world’s embrace of EVs and wonder if the US is entering a “Malaise 2.0” era. Which is why GM wants the world to know that it is still focused on its end goals of electrification, autonomy, and improving vehicle quality while reducing development time.
At this year’s GM Forward event, company executives announced that its hands-off, eyes-off Super Cruise technology will expand across the lineup and be available on nearly every vehicle. This will include the pickup trucks and the crossovers, and not just the Escalade IQ that it was announced for last year.
Sterling Anderson, GM’s head of product, said the company is testing this technology to the tune of 1 million miles (1.6 million km) a month in both the virtual and real world. The goal is that not only would the vehicle be able to take you places, but it could go and do things for you.
That sounds rather dystopian. But Anderson told Ars in an interview that once you realize what your vehicle is capable of doing (beyond the paradigm of being a car to go places), it opens up a world of convenience that might be hard to envision right now. He’s not talking about an Optimus-style robot that’ll do your laundry, but a tool that you use every day that expands to do more things.
GM’s newly announced OnStar AI will play a role. “Imagine you worked late, and you get in your car to go home,” he told us. “Your car might remember that you ordered takeout from a restaurant recently that you frequent and like. The car could prompt you and place a pick-up order for you, which will be ready when you arrive to pick it up.”
Trust is the key here, and Anderson reiterated that several times, suggesting that a car might be a more trusted piece of technology than a mobile phone. “People have a relationship with their cars that they don’t have with other things,” he said. “If your phone randomly suggested your favorite restaurant, it might give you pause, but if your car did so within the appropriate context you might be more willing to accept that.”
OnStar AI will do more than just learn your habits; it will be able to help you better understand and better use your vehicle, we’re told. For example: a driver hears the car beep but doesn’t know what the alert was for. In this case, they could ask OnStar and it would be able to tell them—for example, a speed limit warning. Being a specialized AI trained specifically on the details of the car, it can be integrated in a way that other models, like Google’s Gemini, cannot.
Thanks to new compute on board, announced at last year’s Forward, the car will be able to handle much of that processing locally without requiring a connection to the cloud at all. But a cloud connection could improve the drive or make it safer. For some time now, automakers and suppliers have promised systems that crowdsource data to infer and predict road conditions—if you’re driving through a snowy area, and the cars in front of you have had traction control events, you could receive a warning to be extra careful as you approach.
GM also wants to keep customers within its own ecosystem. Imagine a two-car, two-GM OnStar AI household, and you’re late picking up your child from practice. Here, OnStar AI could look and see your spouse is actually closer, swap roles, and re-direct you to the takeout place to pick up dinner. OK, it’s a very specific use case.