GM's overhaul focuses on AI and automatic driving

General Motors is overhauling the electrical and computational underpinnings of its future vehicles to deliver faster software, more powerful automated driving features and a custom, conversational AI assistant.

The results of this revision will debut within the Cadillac Escalade IQ in 2027.

The US automaker, which unveiled its plans at an event in New York City on Wednesday, said a brand new electric architecture and centralized computing platform will underpin all of its future gasoline and electric vehicles starting in 2028. The next-generation supercomputer, Nvidia Drive AGX Thor, will power the processing unit – the results of an expanded partnership between GM and Nvidia announced in March.

This under-hood renovation is a obligatory step if the corporate desires to introduce more services and features, similar to a conversational AI assistant or a system that enables a automotive to soundly navigate highways while the driving force watches a movie – two products that GM says it’s working on and can construct into future vehicles. It would also allow GM to enhance the performance of its vehicles, fix problems or add latest features to its infotainment systems via software updates – making the corporate overall more competitive against Tesla and the growing threat from Chinese automakers.

Sterling Anderson, GM's chief product officer, said he has been focused on accelerating the rollout of this latest architecture since joining the corporate in May since it “brings numerous good things to it,” similar to bandwidth and a “dramatic increase in computing power.” This is an element of Anderson's broader goal of getting technologically advanced products into the hands of consumers more quickly.

“Going forward, my core focus is absolutely on speed, product user experience and profitability,” Anderson told TechCrunch. “We're looking across the corporate at ways to dramatically reduce the event time for our vehicle platforms. Today it's within the order of 4 to 5 years. I'd wish to get it closer to 2.”

Most modern vehicles, including GM's Buick, Chevrolet, Cadillac and GMC brands, contain dozens of small computers that control every thing from the infotainment and safety systems to the powertrain, steering and brakes. The variety of these computers, called electronic control units, or ECUs, has increased over the past decade as automakers have added more services and features. Tesla, which took a software-first approach from the bottom up, was in a position to outperform established brands with more processing power and the power to introduce latest features and improve performance through over-the-air software updates, much like iPhones or Android-based smartphones.

The legacy automakers have spent years and billions of dollars attempting to catch up.

The industry largely agrees that a part of the answer is to vary the underlying hardware architecture to handle the growing computing needs of infotainment functions, security systems and automatic driving.

GM is taking an identical, although not similar, approach to the zone architectures utilized by Tesla and Rivian. GM said it’ll consolidate dozens of control units right into a unified computer core that can coordinate every subsystem within the vehicle in real time. This core connects to a few aggregators – hubs that convert signals from tons of of sensors within the vehicle right into a unified digital language after which relay commands back to the proper hardware.

The result: The central computing platform connects all systems within the automotive, including drive, steering, braking, infotainment and safety, via a high-speed Ethernet backbone.

GM calls the plan a “complete redesign” of the best way its vehicles are designed, updated and improved over time. The final result, GM claims, will likely be vehicles with 10 times more over-the-air software update capability, 1,000 times more bandwidth and as much as 35 times more AI power for autonomy and advanced features.

GM has been on this software-centric journey to reinvent the vehicle for several years.

In 2020, GM introduced an updated hardware architecture called the Vehicle Intelligence Platform (VIP) to enable greater data processing power and over-the-air software updates. The following 12 months, GM unveiled an end-to-end cloud-based software platform called Ultifi that executives promised would make vehicles more powerful and provides drivers access to in-car subscriptions and latest apps and services via over-the-air updates. The Ultifi branding has since been removed, however it exists in the newest GM models and is the software built on top of the VIP architecture. GM continued its push for a more software-focused vehicle in 2022 by combining dozens of computers used to run the infotainment system onto a single computing platform.

According to GM, this latest move builds on all of that.