GM’s under-the-hood overhaul puts AI and automated driving at the center

General Motors is revising the electric and computational guts of its future vehicles to deliver faster software, more capable automated driving features and a custom, conversational AI assistant.

The result of this overhaul will debut in the 2027 Cadillac Escalade IQ.

The US automaker, which unveiled its plans at an event in New York City on Wednesday, said a new electric architecture and centralized computing platform will be the basis for its future gas-powered and electric vehicles, starting in 2028. The next-generation supercomputer, Nvidia Drive AGX Thor – will power the compute unit of a former partnership. Between GM and Nvidia which was announced in March.

This under-the-hood renovation is a necessary step if the company wants to introduce more services and features, such as a conversational AI assistant or a system that lets a car safely navigate the highway while the driver watches a movie — two products GM says it’s working on and will bring to future vehicles. This would allow GM to improve the performance of its vehicles, fix problems, or add new features to its infotainment system through software updates — all of which would make it more competitive with the growing threat from Tesla and Chinese automakers.

GM Chief Product Officer Sterling Anderson said he is focused on accelerating the rollout of this new architecture. Joined the company in May Because it “brings many benefits”, such as bandwidth and “dramatic increases in computing”. This is part of Andersen’s larger goal of getting technologically advanced products into the hands of customers faster.

“Going forward, in the core business, my focus has really been on speed, product user experience and profitability,” Anderson told TechCrunch. “We’re looking across the business to find opportunities to dramatically reduce the development time of our vehicle platforms. Today, it is on the order of four to five years. I’d like to get it closer to two.”

Inside most modern cars, including GM brands Buick, Chevrolet, Cadillac and GMC, are dozens of tiny computers that manage everything from infotainment and safety systems to propulsion, steering and braking. The number of these computers, known as electronic control units, or ECUs, has grown over the past decade as automakers have added more services and features. Tesla, which took a ground-up, software-first approach, was able to outpace established brands with more computing power and the ability to roll out new features and improve performance through wireless software updates like iPhones or Android-based smartphones.

Legacy automakers have spent years, and billions of dollars, trying to catch up

The industry widely agrees that part of the solution is to change the underlying hardware architecture to handle the growing computational appetite for infotainment features, safety systems and automated driving.

GM is taking a similar, if not identical, approach to the zonal architecture used by Tesla and Rivian. GM says it will integrate dozens of ECUs into a unified computer core that will coordinate every subsystem in the car in real time. This core will be connected to three aggregators – hubs that will convert the signals from the vehicle’s hundreds of sensors into a unified digital language and then route commands back to the correct hardware.

The result: The central computing platform will connect every vehicle system, including propulsion, steering, braking, infotainment and safety, through a high-speed Ethernet backbone.

GM calls the plan a “complete rethink” of how its vehicles are designed, updated and improved over time. The end result, GM claims, will be vehicles with 10 times more over-the-air software update capability for autonomy and advanced features, 1,000 times more bandwidth and 35 times more AI performance.

GM has been on this software-centric, redesign-the-car road for several years.

In 2020, GM introduced an updated hardware architecture called the Vehicle Intelligence Platform (VIP) to allow greater data processing power and over-the-air software updates. The following year, GM unveiled a cloud-based, end-to-end software platform Called Ultifi Executives promised to make the vehicles more capable and give drivers access to new apps and services through in-car subscriptions and over-the-air updates. The Ultifi branding has since been dropped, but it exists on GM’s newer models and is the software that runs on top of the VIP architecture. GM continued its bid for a more software-centric car in 2022 when it consolidated dozens of computers used to operate the infotainment system into a single computing platform.

GM says this latest move builds on all of that.