Some leading car manufacturing companies have been introduced their self-driving cars, and the race is still on and getting warmer. Now General Motors is all set to enter the race and now ready to offer its self-driving car service. Recently, General Motors Co. has announced that the company will soon introduce the autonomous-driving ride-sharing service in San Francisco and the service will be started by 2019. However, after San Francisco, the company will roll out the service in other big cities. On the other hand, the company’s closest competitors like Ford will launch the self-driving cars in 2021. Apart from Ford Motors, Waymo and Uber also there in the race and will soon start the self-driving service. The report says, in few months, Waymo will start the commercial driverless service.
General motors explained its vision during the investors call from San Francisco. As per the company statement, it is working on this project to offer zero crashes, zero emissions, and zero congestion future.
GM President Daniel Ammann stated that “We can tell you today – if we continue on the current rate of change, we’ll be ready to deploy this technology at large scale in the most complex environments, in 2019.”
GM plans to develop such autonomous vehicles that can drive and run providing more safety to the drivers, and the cars will have equipped the software which can be used to request a car. The service will come at a cheaper rate than Uber and Lyft.
Chief Financial Officer Chuck Stevens said that “There’s a very real potential that this business is bigger than our current business – at better margins and higher returns.”
As per the report, GM had earned a net $ 9.4 billion of $166.4 billion in revenue in 2016. But this could be a good business opportunity and all thanks to the modern technology and internet.
“Transportation as a service penetration is in the very early stages,” Ammann informed. “Ride-share is only 0.1% of all U.S. miles driven. We still have 99.9% of the opportunity in front of us.”
GM recent acquisition of Strobe will help the company to reduce the cost of LiDAR sensors by about 99 percent. The electric vehicle architecture coming in 2021, the company aims to reduce the battery costs to less than $100 per kWh now it is $145.
GM is the only company who is working on a fully-integrated platform as the company thinks technology will completely change the world very soon and all will prefer the self-driving cars.
