Comments from the North American International Car Show:
General Motors Co. upped the ante Friday with its Cruise AV, a self-driving electric car based on its Chevrolet Bolt that wraps mobility, autonomy and electrification in one package.
“The technology end of it is the end-all,” says Rod Alberts, executive director of the Detroit Auto Dealers Association and the North American International Auto Show.
It’s the future. Enabling technology and the ability to process massive amounts of data are transforming the future of transportation as fundamentally as Henry Ford’s Model T and his moving assembly line did. They’re persuading Intel Corp. to spend $15.4 billion to acquire an Israeli visioning company, driving Alphabet’s Waymo deep into autonomous car development, birthing GM’s Cruise AV. And more.
The question is not whether cars and delivery vans will drive themselves. It’s how soon, how regulators will react, how quickly the public will adapt, and how successfully century-old automakers can compete in a rapidly evolving space changing with Silicon Valley speed.
And the future of the auto industry, as well as its ancestral home here? Arguably brighter than it’s been in decades, precisely because the technological innovation enabling mobility services and self-driving vehicles is finding its way into the vehicles the industry has a century of experience building. That counts for something, as Tesla Inc.’s manufacturing and quality struggles attest.
General Motors Co. upped the ante Friday with its Cruise AV, a self-driving electric car based on its Chevrolet Bolt that wraps mobility, autonomy and electrification in one package.
“The technology end of it is the end-all,” says Rod Alberts, executive director of the Detroit Auto Dealers Association and the North American International Auto Show.
It’s the future. Enabling technology and the ability to process massive amounts of data are transforming the future of transportation as fundamentally as Henry Ford’s Model T and his moving assembly line did. They’re persuading Intel Corp. to spend $15.4 billion to acquire an Israeli visioning company, driving Alphabet’s Waymo deep into autonomous car development, birthing GM’s Cruise AV. And more.
The question is not whether cars and delivery vans will drive themselves. It’s how soon, how regulators will react, how quickly the public will adapt, and how successfully century-old automakers can compete in a rapidly evolving space changing with Silicon Valley speed.
And the future of the auto industry, as well as its ancestral home here? Arguably brighter than it’s been in decades, precisely because the technological innovation enabling mobility services and self-driving vehicles is finding its way into the vehicles the industry has a century of experience building. That counts for something, as Tesla Inc.’s manufacturing and quality struggles attest.
