Why GM will give you Gemini — but not CarPlay

25:01we're back with gm ceo mary barra and head of product sterling anderson before the break i was asking mary about some of the big bets gm has been making these past five years on electrification and autonomous cars and how she's navigating the current economic and political climate here in the united states but now it's time for the decoder questions

25:21Let me ask you the decoder questions. GM, I think people understand it as nameplates, right? There's GM and GMC and Chevy and Cadillac and Buick and all the rest. How is GM structured as a company, as an operating company? How is it structured? Is it just the divisions and the brands, or are you more functional than that? I think we're more functionally – and Sterling is responsible for our products globally as the chief product officer. because we leverage that to get the scale. But then we also understand for the different brands what we need to do to make sure we're delivering on that brand promise, whether it's true luxury with a Cadillac value, but the unique American heritage that Chevrolet has.

26:04Buick is premium and has been doing very well in growing. And then GMC, which is a very premium truck. So each of our four brands are very specific for what they mean to the customer. So we make sure when we do a portfolio of vehicles or when we're doing, for instance, full-size trucks, that we understand what it means to be a Chevy, means to be a GMC or a Cadillac. We look at all of that. And so it's really a cross-functional team working together to make sure we deliver on that. And then we do have regional sales and marketing team that really understand the customer in each of our markets. So at broad brush, at the most senior level, that's, I would say, the way the company is organized.

26:48So walk me through that in a little more specificity. What you're describing, it sounds complex. So you have centralized product development. We're going to make a pickup truck. And then you have brand expressions of but one pickup truck. How do they decide what goes where? Is that the brands themselves have teams that get to do it? Do they have their own designers? How does that work? Well, I would say, first of all, Sterling and I just came from design, and we were looking at a platform that's going to have both a Cadillac and a Chevrolet. And, you know, so there's the brands in the studio, they have people dedicated to Chevrolet and then a different team that's dedicated to Cadillac.

27:28But then we also have product planning people that are looking at what is the technology roadmap, what features and functionality needs to be on that vehicle, how are we going to make sure that we achieve how we want to go to market from a price perspective, getting back to that affordability or that true luxury. And so, but it's done with people. For instance, the brand is managed for the globe as well. So it's not like a Chevy in South America has a total different team managing it than a Chevrolet in the United States or in another part of the world. So it's not really complex. It actually simplified it.

28:06And we get what is so important in the auto industry is scale. Because once you have scale, that's how you get to give the customer more than they think they would get for a price point because we're leveraging General Motors scale. And I'm very proud that we sell more vehicles in this country than anyone else. We're extremely strong in South America. We have a great business in the Middle East. We still have a significant business in China. And leveraging that scale is one of the things that allows us to keep vehicles affordable or give people more functionality than they expect. That's actually one of the things I'm most interested in is there's the U.S.

28:42market and sort of the markets that are related to the U.S. market or have similar tastes and desires, similar brands competing. And then there's the Chinese market. And I watch a lot of car YouTube, for better or worse. And car YouTubers are increasingly saying, look at these Chinese EVs. They're better than the cars that we can get here. United States protectionism is keeping us from having these cars. And then they go through all the quirks and features of the cars. And I think that's great because I really enjoyed watching car YouTube. If I was in your seat, I'd say, oh boy, the stuff we have to do to compete in China is radically different than the things we have to do to compete in the United States.

29:16How do you manage that split across this portfolio of brands? So our business for China, already you have to use technology in China for China because that's the requirement in China. So already there's a little bit of a fence around that. And there also right now is an incredible price war going on. There needs to be a sorting. You can't have over 100 different OEMs in a country trying to compete, especially now as they're competing on price. And I think if you read what's happening in country right now, there's a lot of change happening. I would also say there's overcapacity in China, which is causing, you know, I think from a business perspective, exporting to other markets.

29:57But they're also doing it in many cases highly subsidized. So we are regularly benchmarking our Chinese competitors like we do global competitors, understanding where they're putting features, where they're not, what they're adding. But I would also say we've got to meet the regulations in this country. The safety standards are different. There's different emission standards. And there's also standards and requirements around connectivity. Like I mentioned, for instance, autonomy in China, you need to use a system that's Chinese-based because the country actually controls the maps. So there's also regulations or executive orders.

30:39I can't remember exactly, but there's rules we have to follow of what we're able to use in-country. So there's already differences. So just to look at what the offering is and not understanding what the rules of the different markets are going either way, I think is a very big simplification. And I don't know, Sterling, if you have anything to add with what you saw at your time at Tesla or just even when you were at Aurora and understanding what markets you could compete. Yeah, a couple of quick things. As Mary said, as we benchmark across these vehicles, if we strip away the subsidies and the other support that the Chinese government is providing to many of these players, we compare favorably on most dimensions with our EVs.

31:23In particular, we've got some work that we're doing around the next generation electric vehicle and electric vehicle architecture that compares very favorably to what we see. So I'm impressed by what they've done. I'll start with that. I think we don't want to be resting on our laurels that way. I think there's more that we can be doing, but we're on it. We recognize very acutely kind of the speed at which an industry that is so heavily subsidized tends to move, and we don't intend to wait for it. And I think Sterling makes a really great point. So we are regularly looking at how do we make every part of our business more efficient.

32:05We don't control what the government policies are. It's evident by what's changed this year. So we just need to have the best product that we have as efficiently as possible. And that's what we're focused on every day. We just had Ford CEO Jim Farley on the show. My friend Joanna Stern interviewed him. I was on leave, so she filled in for me. That was very nice of her to do. He is very clear that BYD makes a better car than Ford. He drove around in the BYD for a while and publicly announced, this is better than our car. On our show, he said to Joanna, we're going to have a better car for you when your Mach-E lease is done.

32:40It's going to be a better car. Don't lease it on a Mach-E. To do that, Ford had to set up an entire skunkworks. That was the payoff of the structural change inside of Ford. We're going to take a bunch of people. We're going to put them aside. We're going to take them out of the Ford ecosystem, let them rethink the car from the ground up. They also announced a new architecture. They announced a new manufacturing process. That was notably led by a Tesla veteran at Ford. Sterling, you worked at Tesla as well. You're at GM now. Did you need to do anything similar inside of GM's culture to get to your new platform, your new ideas?

33:11A couple of quick comments. So I like Doug a lot. We worked together. I worked with Alan Clark, who's been leading the Skunk's Work program for Ford. Both great people. So nothing about that. What I will say is I've seen a fairly oscillatory behavior from some OEMs when it comes to EVs. In one moment, it's a, we'll force an electric powertrain into an ICE platform, and we'll end up with a fairly compromised product as a result that turns people off to certain segments. Electric battery, electric trucks, there's some things that just weren't great about the way that that started in some of this space.

33:49And then I see a pendulum swing all the way to a, it's got to be Skunk Works project. It's going to be done fully independently from a clean sheet. And then we're going to somehow try to ingest it into the broader organization. That ingestion is where the risk lies. I think what I've seen that General Motors has been doing since before, I only got here four months ago. So there's only so much that you can attribute at all to me at this point. But what I'll say is General Motors has taken a much more steady approach to this development. electric vehicles designed and developed and manufactured on electric vehicle architectures, which are not nearly as compromised.

34:29A focus on the cost basis for these vehicles on what are the value added components that we can put in them and what are the things that just don't add that value that we can strip out and kind of refine. Whether it's reduction in menial stuff like spot welds, right? So some of our next generation platforms, dramatic reduction in those. You'll never see those. You'll never hear about them. But they drive an enormous cost. I think at one point the estimate was$40 ,000 per spot weld if you advertise kind of all the costs of the robots and everything else across it. But to the battery chemistry and some of the battery innovations, I think you may be aware that we've been pioneering.

35:07We are today the largest manufacturer of cells in North America. This is larger than Tesla today. We have been pioneering work in lithium manganese rich or LMR battery chemistry that has something closer to the energy density of high nickel batteries that you're familiar with at closer to the cost of lithium iron phosphate or LFP. So a lot of the, and those will come to market first in GM vehicles, in some of our larger vehicles in 2028. So what we've done is oriented the company in some of this kind of the functional strength that Mary references in common design, common engineering to innovate on many of the foundational enablers of compelling battery electric platforms done through the streamlined kind of process that we have for our global product development across the company.

36:02So my expectation is when this hits, as it hits, as LMR hits, as our architectures hit, as our manufacturing improvements hit, as some of our robotics work that we can talk about hits, what you'll see is those immediately kick in. And what's done initially in one model, in one plant, in one brand rapidly scales across a massive portfolio of vehicles. So I think that the leverage that we realized by doing this, much, much higher than what we could do if it were an isolated effort. Nothing against isolated efforts. That's sometimes the thing that you do, you have to do to really move the needle on something.

36:41But I'm really impressed by what the company's been doing since well before I joined. But we're certainly moving that forward. And we can talk about some of the ways in some of our electric architecture. Mary referenced a little bit about what we're doing there around software-defined vehicles. But there's a lot of work to come. But yeah, I guess the core story is, I think we leverage our scale and we leverage our people best when we do this through a streamlined process that's part of the company. Our goal was, let's get the right people in the right functions. And so we brought in, from a software perspective, we brought in a tremendous amount of talent from Silicon Valley, big and small companies, Mag7, et cetera.

37:24When we started to look at it and we said, okay, from a battery perspective, bringing in someone with Kirk Helte who has just worked his whole career in batteries. And then he came and went, oh, my gosh, you've got the capability to do not only core R &D, so when you have a promising startup, you can take that into one of our R &D centers and really see if it's going to scale and it's manufacturable to actually being able to work on process improvements. because you need all of that to get the cost out of the battery to get EVs profitable. And then there's a lot of learnings that flows back in, you know, from a software perspective, it doesn't matter what the propulsion system is.

38:02And so our strategy has been to get the right and the best talent in and make them part of the team. And so, like you said, it's across the board. You're kind of describing really long-term bets, right? I mean, battery chemistry is one of those things where you start on the battery chemistry journey and hopefully it pays off, and that's a step change in the car. Or autonomy is one of those things. I'm actually very curious, Mary. You described bringing in startups and seeing if they'll scale. That was Cruise. It didn't work out. But we're here to talk about eyes-free Super Cruise. And that bet paid off.

38:33So as you think about all of that. What I would say about Cruise is there's a tremendous amount of Cruise talent that's still here. As we looked at what it was going to take. I think everyone. I remember back in 2016, you know, I made the prediction we would have, you know, an autonomous vehicle by 19. You know, it really was a couple years later that we had that. I think you've seen the whole industry, whether you're a tech company or an OEM, realize it's a pretty significant challenge. I think we're closer today. But as we made that change and as we continue to see progress, we looked at it and said, as we want to deploy capital, where do we want to do that?

39:13And do we really want to put all that capital into all the vehicles for ride share when our business today isn't ride share 1.0? It's not taxis. It's not rental cars. And so we made a strategic decision to focus that talent and to have them work closely with engineer and technical talent within General Motors to be able to focus and be in a leading position from personal autonomy. And that's what we're focused on now. And, you know, Sterling coming in, he's got great experience from knowing the car industry from his time at Tesla. And then most recently, you know, the only trucking company that has autonomous trucks on the road.

39:51Again, I think that represents somebody who brings in that expertise that I think is going to help us continue to be on the forefront and lead with these technologies. So from a cruise perspective, we did pivot away from RoboTaxi, but I would say there's a lot of core assets that we're attributing to our personal autonomy journey from an overall autonomy perspective. Let me ask you the other decoder question, and then I want to put all this into practice against the announcements that you guys are making because it all ties together. So this is a decoder question I ask everybody. How do you make decisions?

40:28What's your framework for making decisions? You've obviously made a lot at GM. How do you organize that process? Well, I mean, a lot of the decisions we make are complex. And so one of the things I like to leverage is the senior leadership team. There's nine people that are core to the company that lead all the functions. Sterling is on that team as our chief product officer, along with a few others. And we look at trends both inside and outside our industry. We look at what's happening with technology. We're very focused on where the consumer is. Of course, we benchmark where the competition is.

41:04But then we also look and try to say, where is the consumer going? And I think there's been many times we have found white space in even vehicle segments. When we first put the Buick Encore out, no one thought they were like, no one's going to buy it. That segment now has grown for us to four vehicles and is profitable and growing. And we can't build enough of those vehicles. And so that's just one example. But it's really getting the team together and understanding where is the consumer going, where is technology going, and then what is the roadmap we're going to put forward. I would also tell you, though, it used to be, I would say, five, seven years ago, we would put the portfolio together, and usually it was an annual event.

41:48I would say it's a more frequent event now as we continue to take new learnings and make adjustments because the minute you have new information, you just don't want momentum to put a program forward. You want to pivot and make the change to make sure you're going to be relevant going forward. But I would say my decision-making is largely based, like, let's look at it as a team, different experiences, different skills, and I think together we get to better solutions and a better strategy. We need to take a quick break. We'll be right back.

42:29Support for the show comes from Rippling. If you're a business owner, here's the truth. SaaS promised to make work easier, but now the average company is buried by hundreds of apps that silo your teams, slow you down, and simply don't work together. That's not SaaS. That's SAD. Software as a disservice. That's why you need Rippling. Rippling is the unified platform for global HR, payroll, IT, and finance. They've helped millions replace their mess of cobbled together tools with one system designed to give leaders clarity, speed, and control. By uniting your employees, teams, and departments in one system, Rippling removes the bottlenecks, busywork, and silos your software created.

43:12Automated, perfectly in sync, and seriously simple to use, Rippling gives your company one source of truth for your people, their data, and everything they touch. With Rippling, you can run your entire HR, IT, and finance operations as one. Or pick and choose the products that best fill the gaps in your software stack. And right now, you can get six months free when you go to rippling.com slash decoder. Learn more at r-i-p-p-l-i-n-g dot com slash decoder. That's rippling.com slash decoder for six months free. Terms and conditions apply.

43:55We're back with GM CEO Mary Barra and head of product Sterling Anderson. So far, we've spent a lot of time asking Mary about the car industry's biggest problems and how she's reorienting the company, trying to solve them. But if you go look at the day-to-day conversations about GM EVs on the forums and subreddits, you'll see that they're dominated by one very important decision, the choice to ditch Apple CarPlay and Android Auto. GM has been very adamant about the decision to move on from phone projection in its EVs. And now, as chief product officer, that's Sterling's decision to justify. So I wanted to hear it from him.

44:29Does he still feel good about moving on from CarPlay and Android Auto? And what's he building in the future that will make this entire debate irrelevant? The big announcement that I'm really curious about is Gemini-powered assistant in the car. That's coming, obviously, in 2026. that's I would say an expansion of the idea that GM should have a software platform in its cars right we're running Android automotive in the cars there's an app platform there's a data platform there's Google Assistant in my car my daughter was asking it to play Taylor Swift that's basically all we use that platform for today because she won't let us do anything else but it works it's there the big decision there and I know you know this question is coming is that you bet against putting smartphone projection in your EVs.

45:12There's no Apple CarPlay or Android Auto in the EVs, but the gas cars still have it. How did you make that decision? Well, I think it's really a question of timing as we look at that because really, and I want to make sure that we get Sterling's input on this as well, but as we looked at it and as we made that decision, we were getting a lot of feedback from customers that it was very clunky moving back. It wasn't seamless. And frankly, in some cases, it could be distracting to move back and forth between if you were doing something that you could do on a phone projection type of system versus if you needed to do something in the vehicle.

45:47And we also know that's only going to increase when you look at some of the things we're going to talk about of how we can just make your life better and assist you as we move forward. And I think we're at the very, very early stages of services we can have on a vehicle to improve the overall customer experience and make the journey smoother. And so we looked at that, and we decided that we needed to have a great system in the vehicle that allowed people to have one system, and we're going to continue to make that better and add new features. And Sterling. Yeah, I agree with that. Yeah. Nile, one thing that I'd say here is what we're talking about is the inevitable performance degradation when jumping between S-curves.

46:32And what I'll describe as those X-curves is, you know, the first one was, you know, for some time, I think you and others got attached to phone projection applications largely because the in-vehicle HMI was pretty bad. Your opportunity for doing some of these things was better when you were using that. We've now gotten to a point where, I mean, you're driving a Vistik, I understand. I mean, you've got Dolby Surround Audio. You've got giant screens. You've got giant displays. the analog I would use here is we're on this new S-curve. There is inevitably a jump that has to happen for you to get over to it.

47:11That's uncomfortable for many, right? But frankly, it's a very Jobsian kind of approach to things, right? And the removal of the disk drive, nobody liked that. Everybody on the forums and Facebook was complaining about it. But it was really a, look, guys, flash storage really is the future. Get on board. You'll see that. That's kind of what we're saying here. That's exactly what we're saying. In fact, And the analog that I use for folks is, look, if you're talking to me about CarPlay, it's very likely you've certainly got an iPhone. You've probably got a MacBook. You have the opportunity to use phone projection on your MacBook, right, phone mirroring application.

47:47How many of you are accessing online services like email, social media, and otherwise through the phone projection app in your laptop? Almost none of them do. Why? Because you've got a much larger screen on your laptop. You've got a much more convenient HMI via the keyboard. You've got better speakers. Now take that same analog to the car and ask the same question. Is it in a car that has not only just laptop speakers, not only a laptop screen, but something better and that can move you and that can integrate with, you know, charging infrastructure, with supercruise availability on your maps, all of these other things?

48:23You're in a much more immersive environment that can do so many more things. why would you use the equivalent of a phone mirroring application on a laptop in your car? And so for us, it's a, look, we're taking out the disk drive, guys. Get on board with Flash Storage. That's where the future is. It's kind of the analog. Okay, I have a number of responses for you. All right. I spent a lot of time hearing from our readers about this specifically. The first thing I will say is most people don't use the phone mirroring app on their laptops because it's not illegal to also use your phone while you're using your laptop.

48:57And it is very illegal to use your phone while you're driving your car. So this is the first difference that most of our readers would point to, right? This thing where I need to see my phone, I need access to all of the applications and data on my phone without re-logging in or having multiple user profiles. It's fine with my laptop. It's fine with my iPad. It's not fine in the car. Because what I actually – and the one specific one that sticks in my brain about the library of applications is I'm actually not a huge CarPlay fan. And I complained about it on our other show, and I got this long note from a reader, and he said, look, I use between six and eight audio applications on my three-hour commute.

49:34And one of them is just this, like, very – I believe it was a very niche, like, Bible app. And he's like, they're never going to support this on these other platforms. It's on my phone, and it has a CarPlay extension. And so that's one thing, right? I just want the library of content. Then there's consumers being unable to affect what feels like business dealings at a much higher level. And the example I'll give you there is, yes, my car has Dolby Atmos in it. The number one provider of Atmos tracks in this industry is Apple Music. And Apple Music will not have an app on your phone because I'm confident that Apple wants you to have CarPlay.

50:08And that is a business dealing that consumer demand cannot affect. And that's kind of the shape of the puzzle, right? But, Neelai, I would say we have a good relationship with Apple. I meet at the most senior level with both with Apple, with Google, with all of the tech companies. We're bringing the wallet. We will be announcing that shortly, that we'll have that and have the ability to do some of the vehicle functions through that. So we're having continual conversations with Apple. And I would say we're talking about the opportunity and looking for win-wins. We also have a very good relationship with Google, and we don't enable Android Auto either.

50:49So I would say you're talking about a moment in time versus where the industry is heading from Adobe Atmos and the relationship that we have with Apple. So I wouldn't make some of the broad-based assumptions you're making. No. I think – Do you think I'm going to get the Apple Music app in my Cadillac? We don't have anything to share on that right now. But what I will say is there are – so your first comment really struck at the HMI, right? The ease of use. And do you have to log in to each of these different services and applications in your car? Because if you do, you get some breakage. Some people just will never do that, right?

51:28It's a pain. We're looking at that as well, right? What can we do about federated IDs? What can we do to eliminate that friction of you engaging with your car? I'm not sure I quite follow the whole, like, it's illegal to use your phone when you're driving and not when you're on your laptop. I think that cuts against your argument a little bit because if you're sitting with your laptop on your phone, you don't pick up your phone. If the cops see you looking at your phone while you're driving, you get pulled over. If the cops see you looking at your phone while you're using a laptop, I don't think they're going to do that.

51:58My point being, if you've got your phone on your laptop or you've got your phone on your car, if you're sitting next to your laptop, you don't typically pick up your phone to answer an email. You'll answer it on your laptop. If you're sitting in your car, you wouldn't pick up your phone to use a map application if it's sitting there on a bigger screen in front of you in the car, right? And if you have a convenient HMI by which to dictate. Wait, no, hold on. Not to get too weedsy. Sure. But I know we have a lot of readers who have Windows laptops, for example. Okay. And they are constantly picking up their phone to use iMessage on their iPhones because that is not an experience that you can project.

52:31Correct. Yeah, that's right. To Windows in a meaningful way. And that kind of gets to Mary's point, right? which is don't count out the expected. Don't expect that we won't have a growing list. I mean, today we use Google Automotive Services in these cars. That's got access to the Play Store. Quite a few apps available through that. They'll only grow in time, as will availability of apps from other places. And I think, you know, overarching, we want to give the consumer a great experience in the car that's not clunky, that allows them to getting to this point of safety that one of your viewers talked about, that you can be the least distracted and pull even more information from the vehicle to improve the way your whole experience overall.

53:16So, you know, we're at, I'd say, the early phase of making that shift and now continuing to add more to it, continuing to make it more intuitive. How do we make, you know, access to more apps and more things you want to leverage? So we're excited about the future that we have coming for what's going to be available in the system we put into the vehicle. So let me ask you the second part of that question again because I think it's – again, we're talking so much about the future. And I understand the argument about the future you're making. But you still have the smartphone projection in the gas cars.

53:51Why is it still in the gas cars? Well, if you look at it, a lot of it depends is when do you do an update to that vehicle. When you look at the fact that we have over 40 models across our portfolio, you don't just do this and they all update. So I think you'll see as we move forward with each new vehicle and major new vehicle launch, I think you're going to see us consistent on that. We made a decision to prioritize our EV vehicles during this time frame. And as we go forward, we'll continue across the portfolio. So we should expect new gas cars will not have smartphone projection. As we get to a major rollout, I think that's the right expectation, yes.

54:33Let's talk about that next rollout. I'm very interested in the fact that you're putting Gemini in the cars. We obviously use Google Assistant in our car today. AI has often been described to me as a platform shift. And in particular, like natural language interface has been described as a major kind of platform shift. And then maybe the way we write applications will change with MCP and these other technologies. But the platform shift is you're going to talk to the computer. It's going to understand it. It's going to take some action for you. Are you feeling that way about the car, that AI and particularly these assistants will let you have a platform shift inside the car?

55:04Yeah. Yeah, we are. So we're thinking about AI across the business, right? Not just in kind of what it does to the product experience, but what it does to our development of the product. What it does to kind of what we can do to bring to bear the massive data that this company has in our production systems, in our CAD and development systems to leverage in development of AI for production for the product. As it relates to the product, though, what I'll say is this is one of the really important enablers of speed in a company with a portfolio this broad is development of a common platform or undergirding infrastructure on which we can deploy, including over-the-air software updates.

55:57As Mary mentioned, there are some legacy platforms that will kind of work their way out of the portfolio. But one of the things we're working on in the software-defined vehicle space is a new electrical architecture that centralizes all compute in the vehicle. It doesn't just move the compute to zonal aggregators. It centralizes all of it. In the upper trims, it leads to about a 35 times increase in the computational power of these vehicles. It allows for – This is the 2028 Escalade IQ, right? It will arrive first on the 2028 IQ. With massive amounts of compute. That's right. What it does is, from a networking perspective, it moves to Ethernet-based networking, which allows us to move to sub-millisecond response times.

56:41Take magnetic suspension systems or dampers as your example. From accelerometer through controller back to actuator, we're talking sub-1 millisecond. Right? You're talking 1 ,000 hertz. That's a 10x improvement over previous electrical architectures. It's a massive, massive opportunity, not only for the dynamics, which I found General Motors is extraordinarily good at, but for the software that we can deploy on this. Because now we've got a centralized architecture. Now we've got a central compute on which we can run a variety of applications to which we can deploy updates to those applications at a much higher pace than what we do today.

57:22And so that flexibility that comes via abstraction of hardware and software with this new electric architecture is really going to be a powerful enabler for us going forward. And something that I'm excited about. So going forward, your questions about why can I get some things on one car and not another, you're going to have far fewer of those because you're going to have a lot more kind of commonality throughout the portfolio based on this platform that separates hardware from software. You keep calling it HMI. It's human-machine interface for people who are not total nerds like us. The idea, though, that you will be able to just speak, right?

57:58You'll be able to say, hey, Gemini, and you'll just have some natural language conversation with the car. There's a lot of things you could do with that. But there's also a lot of questions about how well that might work. Even today, as expressed in Chowchee TV and Gemini itself, a lot of questions about how those things might fundamentally operate. What kinds of applications might we build? How reliable will they be? How much hallucinate? How many hallucinations might we have? Is that going to be enabled by your new architecture, too? Or are you going to send all of that to the cloud? There are a number of things that we're going to infer directly on the vehicle.

58:31and we've got quite a bit of, as I mentioned, the computational power is there for us to do a lot of on-vehicle inference. What I'll say, though, is step one, what you're referencing is in the Gemini-based conversational AI work that we're going to release next year, that's really about kind of vocal interaction, voice-based interaction with your car. It's about asking about your destination. It's about asking about a number of other things where it can give you kind of contextual responses. is I think you're hitting at the heart of, well, but many elements of the car, if you're going to directly control them, are safety critical.

59:07And how can you deal with the kind of accuracy that you get out of an untailored LLM if you're giving it direct access to those things? And the short answer is we're not. We are developing, in addition to the contextual AI that comes out next year, a more powerful, specifically tailored AI that will learn from not just your preferences and not just the data that you have available via a variety of other mechanisms, but it will be specifically tailored, customized, and learned from the vehicle itself, its functions. It will have specific access to specific functions. It will have other controls in place that a generic LLM doesn't have.

59:50So I think that the value of these large models oftentimes can be realized in much greater effect through tailoring and fine-tuning for specific application areas, and that's what we're going into post the Gemini conversational AI work. And the only thing I would add, at General Motors, we always prioritize safety. You know, we were the first to have a driver assistance technology out with Super Cruise, but we very much prioritized the safety of that and enabled different features as we were. We saw it demonstrate that it could meet the safety standards that we have. I think that's what Sterling's talking about now is as we do this, we won't just, you know, go wide open, but we'll make sure that the integrity of the safety systems are there.

1:00:35If it's controlling a temporally sensitive or safety-relevant function, it will happen locally. One of the reasons I'm asking about that very specifically is I'm watching your partner, Google. I'm watching Amazon. I'm watching Apple. They control a lot of that stack, right? They control the LLMs. They control the inference. They control the smart home platforms. And they have not been able to connect those assistants in the way that you're describing, right? Alexa Plus exists, and it has to fall back on some complicated deterministic system to flip lights up and down, and they have to do some orchestration.

1:01:11And Google Home, they're doing the same thing over there. Gemini is rolling out, and it has to fall back. And it's working however it works. Apple has not been able to ship this product, which they have promised people. I say, hey, Google, turn off the lights. By the way, my Google is going to turn off the lights, so I shouldn't say that. But if I ask my assistant here to turn off the lights and it doesn't happen, maybe the worst outcome is my wife is once again annoyed at me for trying to voice activate our home. If I get that wrong in the car, many other things can go wrong. That's right. That's right, 100%.

1:01:39This is something that we are very keyed on, right? Whether it's the development of our self-driving system, where we are acutely familiar with and aware of the challenges that arise when you have a kind of monolithic end-to-end system about which you can't make any strong guarantees, to other controls across the car that are safety relevant. As I said, we are – I mean, that's probably a much longer conversation than we have time for here, but this becomes architecturally relevant in the design of our self-driving system. It's architecturally relevant in the design of the rest of our AI and how it interfaces with vehicle controls, and we are taking that very carefully.

1:02:22And we have a safety group within the company that really looks at that and is looking at all those decisions are made because they can think through second order, third order, down the road, really thinking through to make sure that we've interrogated it to make sure we're making good decisions and we're not going to put the driver or the passengers into a situation that no one wants to be in. I actually have a call-in question from Joanna Stern. She let me do a call-in question on her episode, and it tracks here. So I'm going to play this for you from Joanna. Hi, Mary. It's Joanna Stern here.

1:02:55As you may have heard, my lease on my Ford Mach-E is up in August 2026. If I buy a Chevy Equinox when the lease is up, will I be able to chat with Gemini in the car? So what she's asking is if she buys one with Google Assistant in it today, will that get upgraded to Gemini? I personally don't know the exact rollout plan. And so I say, email me and we can talk to you about that. I don't know what our rollout is and I don't know what we've released yet. This isn't one of those situations. So I don't know, certainly if you know, but I know we haven't made it public yet. So we'll get back to you. Yeah, I'm very curious.

1:03:33I mean, I obviously want the upgrade in my car as well. So when we were discussing the call-in, I was like, you should ask that. Because she is very much in the market for a new car. So if you can sell her one, because she likes talking to chat GPT in the car. This is my other question. Why pick Gemini? When you evaluate all the universal partners, obviously, Chachi, OpenAI, huge consumer market share. Google, obviously, is very capable. You already have the partnership. Was it as simple as we already have the partnership, or did you do the full evaluation? I think the team – I know the team did the full evaluation.

1:04:01And as we looked at what we needed to do, clearly, they've been a good partner to us. But it was a full evaluation. When you think about the long-term future, right, you're also announcing a robotics division. You're announcing batteries in the home. You're announcing eyes-free driving, level three autonomy in the 28 Escalade. That's a big shape of how we will interact with cars, right? You're going to get to the house. Your car will be part of your energy system in your house. You'll have robotics that will let you take the technologies you're building for autonomy and AI in the car and put them in your house.

1:04:35That's a pretty tight integration of how people feel about their cars today and how people feel about the things in their home. And somewhere in there is what is the next generation of devices, right? This is like the big question that's animating the tech industry around me. How are we going to graduate from our phones? You've obviously made a big bet, right? We're going to graduate from our phones in a car, and a car is going to be a big part of that platform. But then you've got to go in the house, and there's going to be a GM robot. There's going to be a GM power supply. How are you thinking about that extension as the rest of the industry grapples with what happens after the phone?

1:05:07Well, we already have quite an extensive offering from a GM energy perspective and then the ability that your vehicle can actually power your home and power outages. So that's something we're continuing to work to make that vehicle work even harder for the owner. Beyond, when we talk about robotics, there's a lot that's a broad term, and I'm sitting here speaking to someone who has his PhD in robotics, so I probably should turn it over to him. But, you know, when we look at, you know, what we're doing on the factory floor with a COBOT that is able to take over and do things that create safety issues for our team members or create ergonomics issues or get rid of what, you know, non-value-added activities that makes everyone more efficient.

1:05:55But that learning and what we're doing, I think, is something that we can look at for broader application. but I would say, you know, start when we look at it from that perspective and we already look at what we're doing from a GM energy perspective for the home. I think there's a lot of potential as we move forward. And Sterling, what would you like to add? Yeah. The only thing I'd add is we are focused on growth areas that are both tangential to and kind of synergistic with our core business. When you say batteries and energy storage, we've recently announced a partnership with Redwood Materials, for instance, where our Second Life batteries are currently powering the largest second use energy storage system in the world.

1:06:43The largest microgrid in North America in Sparks, Nevada, it's 63 megawatt hours, I think I remember that being. So there's tremendous opportunity there. When we talk about grid rebalancing, particularly as we move into LMR, which has much higher cycle life, we get into a world where by plugging your car in when it's at home or your place of work, your car can be an active participant in the rebalancing of the grid, pulling power from in lulls and pushing power to at peak times. This is an enormous opportunity for the industry. It's an enormous opportunity for kind of, I mean, energy is going to be a very constrained resource if the last several months of discussion in the AI space has taught us nothing.

1:07:33I mean, we're talking about a triple kind of the capacity needed online. We can play a pretty big role in that. As the largest cell manufacturer in the United States, there's a lot we can be doing there. In robotics, I'll just kind of paint the picture for a moment, particularly in a world of learned models, right, which is effectively where AI is taking us, data is really important, right? And the quantity of data, the cleanliness of that data, the availability of that data in training systems that can take on more tasks than what they've ever done before. Look at a business like General Motors, and you see a product, each of whose parts is known in detail.

1:08:16It's sitting in CAD. We know the mass. We know the materials. We know the response to manipulation. We know the flows of that material through a production system. We know what happens at each step of the production system. Every single step is meticulously outlined in work instructions. That is an enormous kind of database from which to develop really competent physical AI systems, embodied AI systems that can be powerful enablers, both of our own production and the safety of our employees. So today we've got, I think, 30 ,000 robots operating alongside on the order of 97 ,000 production associates in 11 facilities.

1:08:58These, you think of automotive robots, and you're probably thinking of giant arms that sit in cages with e-stops on the outside that can't operate in and around humans because they're simply not designed for it. We're developing autonomous mobile robots that move materials through our factories. We've started deploying those. We're developing cobots or collaborative robotic systems that can operate alongside associates that are currently in our factories and are scaling up that can, for instance, manipulate and bring a part to the line to hand it to a kind of worker, hold it in place for that worker to shoot the bolts.

1:09:36So there's tremendous opportunity for us to build that, not only for our own use, it improves the safety, the efficiency, the throughput of our own business, but to expand that to our supply base to increase our competitive moat. and then ultimately to productize it and commercialize it for others in the kind of industrial automation space. At least in my head, it is a small jump from we have an AI-enabled robot that can bring a factory worker bolts to I have a robot at my house that can bring me a beer, right? Like the kind of manipulation you're describing actually has a pretty massive general purpose application.

1:10:11Are you thinking that far ahead? Well, I would say we think of a lot of things. I mean, one of the things that General Motors, we're constantly innovating, as I mentioned, we were just in design and looking at, you know, what the future holds of what we can bring forward. I think we continue to imagine what the applications can be, but not making any commitments or announcements today. But, you know, we do. We recognize, as Sterling said, the amount of information that we have and the very complex work that is done today in our factories and what we can do to better support our team members. So I think there's a whole new world that, you know, is in front of us, an opportunity for us as we move forward.

1:10:55You described a lot of things that a lot of other companies are doing. Obviously, Tesla does a lot of these same things. They've pushed really far ahead with what they refer to as full self-driving. They're demoing Optimus however well Optimus works or does not work, unknown. The difference in culture is stark, right? I can just identify the difference in culture. They are less worried about safety. Elon Musk is less worried about the safety of full self-driving than GM, than Mary is about supercruise on the highways, right? It's just obvious. They are less worried about making promises that they might not be able to keep with Optimus.

1:11:28In many ways, this is to GM's credit. I think more car companies are worried about safety. But in many ways, it has contributed to the perception that Tesla is vastly ahead. Do you think about that balance? Because if I had to just identify the cultural difference, and Sterling, I'm curious, since you've worked at both places, if I had to just identify the cultural difference, that would be it. Well, I would say I've been at this company for over 40 years, and it's existed for well over 100. and I would say safety is an overriding priority. Safety of our workforce, not just for injury, but also preventative from an ergonomic perspective.

1:12:09We are committed to, and I'm very proud that we have an industry-leading record and it translates into safety of our vehicles. And I probably get three or four letters a week from someone sending me a picture of them and they'll send me a picture of the vehicle that is somewhat unrecognizable. And I can tell you many of them, they walked away with just a scratch. I've had letters sent to me from people in a hospital bed thanking me and say, I will be buying a General Motors vehicle for the rest of my life because I know what you do and design into safety. And we have the highest loyalty scores from a manufacturer perspective or from a car company perspective for our consumers.

1:12:51So I think safety is not just a kind of a cultural perspective. It is a commitment to our customer. Now, as we look and we go forward, how do we deliver that safety and how do we do it more efficiently? We're always looking for ways that we can be better, but I think it's a very important of the promise. And if you read half of the letters that I get from our consumers and you look and see what they walked away from, I think it would be something that motivates you every day to continue to deliver on that promise. Do you ever perceive that it's holding you back? No, I perceive it as serving the customer.

1:13:31Now, and so we'll look at, you know, decisions we're making, but also we have a very, you We all have a regulator with NHTSA, but we look at that and we are very forthright and transparent because we want them to know what we're working on, what we're looking at. And again, they're our regulator, but I think having that so they understand how we look at safety for the long term is going to pay dividends, and I think it's going to pay dividends for the consumer. So I don't think it holds us back. I think it keeps us focused on what's really important. And time will tell. But, you know, again, I'm proud of our safety record and I'm proud of what our customers say.

1:14:15And you've seen it from a different perspective. So, please. Yeah. Yeah, Neelai, if the stereotypical view that I think has been expressed of, you know, a traditional automaker super focused on safety might suggest we are sitting still and just putting out vehicles with great airbags, seatbelts, and crumple zones, right? Like, and we're good with that. I think the reality is far different for GM. Our customers have driven over 700 million hands-free miles with Super Cruise without a single accident attributed to that technology. I led autopilot. You can't say that for autopilot. I think this is a long-term play.

1:15:01We build trust with customers by delivering safe products. look at in the autonomy space, look at every company that's had a major incident that could be attributed to that company, how to go for them afterwards. They may have gotten there quicker, but it didn't go well once the public lost trust. We have earned that. We will retain it and we're going to build on it. And so the work that we're doing in, be it autonomy, be it robotics, be it a number of other areas, I think this caricature of a traditional OEM doesn't fit. This caricature of bubble-wrapped vehicles that aren't innovating, it just doesn't work.

1:15:48The number of bets that we're making that Mary's made. I mean, Mary years ago when I was in the autonomy space, I watched her make the investment in Cruise. I watched her kind of lead that to a place where Cruise was the first to deploy commercially in a densely urban setting. I think the reality of what GM has done simply doesn't match the caricature. I have one very, very small feature request, but it's very important to me. The buttons that control the seat memory on the door in my Cadillac Vistic do not also switch the user profiles on the infotainment system. So when I get in the car, I need to push the button to move my seat to my seat memory, and switch the profile from my wife's profile to my profile.

1:16:35And I have no idea why I have to do both. I just want to be able to push the seat memory button and have that switch the profile as well. Can you fix that for me? I'm going to take a quick look. That can't be hard. Let me take a quick look. If you read the forums, I will tell you, that is the basic shape of the response to this problem, is that can't be hard. It can't possibly be. Let me take a look. These are different systems. and also what it would take to do it we'll look at both we are open to customer feedback and we love the fact that you're driving a Vista oh you will come to regret it as I have more and more feature requests the next time you're back on the show Mary Sterling thank you much for being on Decoder I'm excited to have you back again soon

1:17:19I'd like to thank Mary Barra and Sterling Anderson for taking the time to join me on Decoder and thank you for listening I hope you enjoyed it If you'd like to let us know what you thought about this episode or really anything else at all, you can drop us a line. Email us at decoderatheverge.com. We really do read all the emails. Or hit me up directly on Threads or Blue Sky. We also have a TikTok, an Instagram, and now a YouTube channel for all these interviews. Check them all out at decoderpod. They're a lot of fun. If you like Decoder, please share it with your friends and subscribe over to your podcasts.

1:17:45Also, good news. Paid subscribers to The Verge can now listen to Decoder, Version History, and The Verge Cast completely ad-free. Just head to your account settings page to opt in to start listing without ads. If you're not a member of The Verge yet, you can sign up at theverge.com slash subscribe to get ad-free podcasts, plus other perks like exclusive newsletters and unlimited access to everything we publish. On that note, we're coming up on a year since we launched The Verge's subscription, and we want to hear from you about how it's going. If you enjoy what we do, subscribing directly supports our journalism and helps us keep doing the work that matters.

1:18:14So your feedback means a lot to us. Take our quick survey at theverge.com slash survey and tell us what you think. Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. We'll see you next week.

1:18:29Refresh your good vibes with TikTok. Mit den richtigen Vibes wird

1:18:36Oh man! Zu

1:18:48Jetzt probieren Die verschiedenen Tic Tac Sorten Von minzig frisch bis fruchtig süß Tic Tac Refresh your good vibes Wirklich jung bist du Wenn du die Welt mit offenen Augen siehst Wenn du dich treiben lässt Neues entdeckst and feel you alive. The new SEAT Ibiza. About 175€ per month. More info on www.seat.de and at your SEAT Partner.