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November 6, 2016

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Home » Business » Economy

Transforming transportation for tomorrow

By Dan Ammann | November 6, 2016, Sunday | Print Edition

PRESIDENT, General Motors Company

The automotive industry has reached a crossroads in which traditional vehicle manufacturing is converging with innovative information technologies to revolutionize personal mobility. At IBLAC, General Motors is sharing its insights and know-how for helping lead Shanghai’s transportation system to a sustainable future.

China has more megacities with populations above 10 million than any other country. Shanghai is one of them. The growing urbanization, which is being accompanied by growing demand for personal mobility, is creating new challenges such as rising pollution, traffic congestion and road accidents.

The “Internet Plus” is positively disrupting the automotive industry’s traditional business model to make vehicles smarter and more connected. As a result, GM expects the automotive industry to change more in the next five years than it has in the last 50.

This will impact cities around the world. By 2030, about 50 percent of vehicles sold are expected to be highly autonomous and 15 percent fully autonomous. And in dense urban areas, electric vehicle penetration could reach 50 percent.

GM and other companies are investing heavily to make the future arrive sooner rather than later. We are redefining personal mobility in the areas of connectivity, car and ride sharing, autonomous driving and alternative propulsion, and all of the new technologies that enable them.

Safer, simpler and better

Our goal is to create safer, simpler and better ways for people to move productively and enjoyably throughout their lives.

GM is sharing our solutions with Shanghai to help it become a leader in green and intelligent transportation. This dovetails with Shanghai’s 13th Five-Year Plan for making the city a global innovation center by 2020.

It also echoes the vision of sustainable transportation in the year 2030 that GM showed the world at Expo in 2010 in Shanghai. It is a future free from petroleum, free from emissions, free from congestion and free from accidents.

We are not doing it simply for altruistic reasons. We are also doing it because it is what our customers want.

Consumers worldwide are telling us that they want unfettered personal mobility. More than 70 percent of car buyers have said that they would delay making a purchase from their preferred brand for a year to get connected vehicle services.

Many of them are in Shanghai, a city that has several advantages to help it lead in smart transportation. It is creating a framework for new business models such as ride sharing, and encouraging the testing and deployment of intelligent and connected vehicle technologies.

This will meet the needs of consumers while creating new investment and job opportunities. It will generate new revenue and transform the automotive industry from traditional manufacturing into transportation services. At the same time, it will support the development of additional industries such as infrastructure construction and software and hardware development.

Four pillar areas

Bringing together technology in the pillar areas of connectivity, car and ride sharing, autonomous driving and alternative propulsion offers an opportunity to address the challenges facing the automotive industry and cities such as Shanghai.

GM has a very strong foundation in the connectivity space. By the end of 2016, we will have 12 million OnStar-connected vehicles on the road. We already have more than 2 million 4G LTE-equipped vehicles on the road in Europe, Asia and North America. And by 2020, more than 75 percent of our global sales volume will be actively connected.

In ride sharing, we invested in Lyft to build a long-term strategic alliance to create an integrated network of on-demand autonomous vehicles in the US. We also started our own personal mobility brand called Maven to integrate and expand existing car-sharing programs. In China, we invested in Yi Wei Xing (Beijing) Technology Co Ltd, a leading car-sharing technology solution provider.

In the area of autonomous driving, GM has expanded the development and testing of the Chevrolet Bolt autonomous vehicle — a version of our cutting-edge new Bolt electric vehicle — with Cruise Automation in the US. We have also been testing and validating Super Cruise semi-autonomous driving technology for the past several years.

In China, GM has been helping lead the development of the country’s V2X application layer standard. We are one of the authors of the recently released China Intelligent and Connected Vehicle Road Map, which provides a guideline for the research and development activities of manufacturers and future policy development by the government.

On November 3, GM demonstrated eight safety applications for its latest intelligent and connected vehicle technology for the first time in China, including six vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) safety applications and two newly developed vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) safety applications.

In alternative propulsion, GM is applying a new generation of information technology and green vehicle manufacturing to build an industry-leading green product lineup. Through 2020, GM and our joint ventures in China will roll out more than 10 new energy vehicles, including the Cadillac CT6 plug-in hybrid electric vehicle manufactured in Shanghai.

No one company or one organization has all the answers to the challenges we are currently facing or expect to face in the future. We at GM intend to be at the forefront of this new future. It is important that we work together to help Shanghai achieve its goal of building a smart city by leveraging our individual strengths as members of the business and academic community and government.

Economy


 

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