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

General Motors is overhauling the electrical and computing capabilities of its future vehicles in an effort to offer faster software, more capable automated driving features, and a dedicated conversational AI assistant.

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

The US automaker, which revealed its plans at an event on Wednesday in New York City, said the new electrical architecture and central computing platform will be the basis for all of its future gas-electric vehicles, starting in 2028. A next-generation supercomputer, the Nvidia Drive AGX Thor, will power the computing unit – the result of an expanded partnership between GM and Nvidia announced in March.

This under-the-hood revamp is a needed step if the company wants to offer more services and features, such as a conversational AI assistant or a system that allows the car to safely navigate highways while the driver watches a movie — two products GM said it is working on and will bring to future vehicles. It would also allow GM to improve the performance of its cars, fix problems, or add new features to its infotainment systems via software updates — all of which would make it more competitive with 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 new architecture since joining the company in May because it “brings a lot of good,” such as bandwidth and a “significant increase in compute.” It’s part of Anderson’s broader goal of getting technologically advanced products into consumers’ hands faster.

“Going forward, in terms of the core business, my focus has been on speed, user experience of the product and profitability,” Anderson told TechCrunch. “Across the company we are looking for opportunities to significantly reduce the development time for our vehicle platforms. Today, it takes four to five years. I would like to take it closer to two years.”

Inside most modern cars, including GM’s Buick, Chevrolet, Cadillac and GMC brands, there are dozens of small computers that handle everything from infotainment and safety systems to propulsion, steering and braking. The number of these computers, called electronic control units or ECUs, has risen over the past decade as automakers have added more services and features. Tesla, which has taken a comprehensive software-first approach, has been able to outpace established brands with more computing power and the ability to roll out new features and improve performance through wireless software updates, similar to iPhones or Android smartphones.

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

The industry broadly 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 takes a similar, though not identical, approach to the regional architectures used by Tesla and Rivian. GM said it will integrate dozens of electronic control units into a unified computer core that coordinates every subsystem in the car in real time. This center will be connected to three collectors – hubs that convert signals from hundreds of sensors in the car into a unified digital language and then route commands back to the correct devices.

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

GM describes the plan as a “complete reimagining” 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, 1,000 times more bandwidth, and up to 35 times more AI performance for autonomy and advanced features.

GM has been on this software-centric road of reimagining the car for several years.

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

GM says this latest step builds on all of this.