General Motors (GM)

As we often like to highlight when talking about self-driving development programs, data can make all the difference. And the best way to accumulate a lot of data is through large test fleets. While Tesla went the way of adding sensors to all its production vehicles to gather data, most other automakers and tech companies are doing it through captive test fleets, which all vary in sizes.

GM could be about to get the largest of those fleets by increasing their number of test vehicles, Chevy Bolt EVs with Cruise Automation’s sensor suite, from just 50 to 300.
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Last year, GM stepped into the autonomous driving scene by acquiring Cruise Automation, a startup with Tesla Autopilot engineering talent and founded by Twitch co-founder. It enabled GM to tap into the software talent in California to build its future self-driving technology.

Now GM announces that it plans to add 1,100 jobs in California through Cruise in order to expand its self-driving effort. The move is likely to make the hiring scene for autonomous driving even more competitive for companies than it already is…
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GM’s Chevy Bolt EV has been receiving great reviews as the “first affordable long-range electric vehicle” since its launch in December 2016, but the problem with the vehicle is its availability. Since before its introduction, we have warned that GM was showing signs of using the Bolt as a low-volume compliance car and everything since the launch solidifies that belief.

It has reportedly been difficult for consumers to get their hands on the vehicle outside of California – despite having officially expanded to other states.

Now GM launches a “national lease” for the Bolt EV, which means that you can technically drive electric for $329 per month – if you can find a Bolt EV near you.
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GM has been working on its own driver assist technology ‘Super Cruise’, which it presented as a competitor to Tesla’s Autopilot last year, for a while now. It was first supposed to launch in the 2016 version of the Cadillac CT6 two years ago, but after several delays, the company announced today that it will be available in the 2018 Cadillac CT6 later this year.

They release more information about the semi-autonomous driving system, which is almost presented as a level 3 autonomous driving system – something that is not available today in other vehicles (Tesla’s Autopilot is level 2).
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There are a lot of companies now working on autonomous driving technologies and as many approaches to achieve the ultimate goal of a safe fully self-driving system. With such a transformative technology, there will be an extraordinarily important first-mover advantage.

Navigant Research attempted to create a leaderboard based on each company’s vision and execution in order to get an idea of which ones might have a lead. It published the report this week with interesting results.
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GM’s Chevy Bolt EV sales went down in February in the middle of its production ramp up and now we learn that they have stayed at the same level, 978 units, in March, according to GM’s delivery report today.

While it’s not uncommon to see delays during a production ramp up, we are now 4 months into the start of production and GM has been expanding the Chevy Bolt EV’s market without more inventory.
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It has long been suspected that car dealerships are part of the problem when it comes to electric vehicle adoption. Most of their business comes from servicing gas-powered cars and therefore, low-maintenance electric vehicles are not attractive to sell for them. It was demonstrated in several studies that they are not very good at it.

It was demonstrated this week in a new advert from a Chevy dealership in Rockville, Maryland trying to sell the all-electric Bolt EV as if it needs gas.
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There’s a good news-bad news situation going on with GM’s Chevy Bolt EV right now. As we recently reported, deliveries surprisingly went down to 952 units in the US last month – only 3 months in GM’s production ramp up for the all-electric vehicle.

Now it seems that dealerships are getting more inventory, which is a good news, but they are discounting – sometimes quite heavily – in order to move them.
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After a few weeks of talks, GM and the PSA Group, Peugeot-Citroën, have confirmed that the latter will purchase GM’s European business, including Opel/Vauxhall subsidiary and GM Financial’s European operations.

As part of the €2.2 billion ($2.3 billion) transaction, GM will get warrants to purchase shares of PSA and the two automakers will collaborate on “the further deployment of electrification technologies”.
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In its first full year of production, which is this year, GM is expected to produce about 30,000 Chevy Bolt EVs. While deliveries don’t reflect that so far, the company is currently expanding to more markets.

The automaker confirmed its February deliveries in the US today and with only 952 units, Bolt EVs deliveries are actually down month-to-month after 1,162 deliveries in January.
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GM has been fleshing out its plans for autonomous driving over the past year and it is becoming clear that they are serious about the technology since their $1 billion acquisition of Cruise Automation.

Now a new report suggests that they plan on deploying a fleet of “thousands of autonomous Chevy Bolt EV with Lyft” as soon as next year.
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Even we were surprised when we heard the news that the Chevy Bolt EV would get 238 miles on a charge according to the EPA on a 60kWh battery. The “SubCompact Crossover”, as Chevy likes to call it, gets about 30 more miles of EPA range than Tesla’s huge, 7 seat Model S on the same battery capacity but without the low drag coefficient that the Tesla enjoys.

Read our Chevy Bolt EV review

But some new Bolt EV drivers are finding they can really stretch out that mileage, especially in California where the weather is in the 60s or higher year round.

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Korea-based electronic giant LG is making most of the components that make the Chevy Bolt EV an electric vehicle, including the battery pack, electric motor, and power electronics, and the battery packs for the Volt. Therefore, its production capacity will determine GM’s total output for what is currently its only all-electric vehicle in production.

In what could be a good sign for the Bolt EV and the Volt, LG announced this week an expansion of its production facility in Holland, Michigan.
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GM announced today an expansion of Maven, its car-sharing and ridesharing service, in Los Angeles with the introduction of the all-electric Chevy Bolt EV in the fleet.

Once fully deployed, this new initiative will add over 100 Bolt EVs to the Los Angeles fleet.
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Things are moving fast these days at Opel, GM’s European brand. Both GM and the PSA Group, Peugeot-Citroën, have confirmed that they are in talks to further their collaboration and that it could lead to the sale of Opel to PSA.

At the same time, the company’s top management has been working on a strategy to completely transition the brand to only sell all-electric vehicles.
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Last week, Cruise Automation, GM’s startup working on self-driving technology, released a video of its Bolt EV prototype driving autonomously in San Francisco. Even though the company claimed it was driving autonomously, it was quite boring since it was from a dashcam and looked exactly like a video of someone driving around for a few minutes.

The company learned from its mistake and with a simple in-video feed from inside the vehicle, they released a much more impressive video this week showcasing their latest self-driving progress.
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When GM first introduced the Chevy Bolt EV, the automaker said that they didn’t plan for the all-electric car to replace the Chevy Spark EV, but things have changed. Now two years later and after the Bolt has hit a few markets, the company confirmed that its first all-electric vehicle program in a decade is now dead. 
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Today, GM released its delivery report for the month of January and confirmed that it delivered 1,162 Chevy Bolt EVs so far this year. It sounds like the vehicle is still production constrained since the company claims that it has “the fastest days to turn in the industry at 7 days.”
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After a soft launch in California last year, GM’s Chevy Bolt EV is now arriving in Canada – or at least one Bolt EV has arrived in Canada. GM’s Bourgeois Chevrolet dealership in Rawdon, Quebec, announced that it received its first all-electric Bolt EV.
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As we reported yesterday, Tesla is suing its former Director of Autopilot programs, Sterling Anderson. The company claims that he allegedly poached Tesla employees and stole confidential information in order to start a competing company with Chris Urmson, the former head of Google’s self-driving program.

Anderson denies the allegations, but regardless of what happened, Tesla made a bold claim about the motive behind launching his new company and in the process, they took a solid swipe at GM and Uber.
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While reminiscent of the recent claims of unintended sudden accelerations in Tesla’s vehicles, especially after a Model X owner crashed into his own garage, we are not talking about the same thing here. Instead, we are talking about a possible acceleration without anyone being in the car – making a pedal misapplication unlikely.

That’s what a new Chevy Bolt EV owner in California claims happened after having parked his car in his garage earlier this week.
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