Name: General Motors Drives for Change
Uploaded: 2019-12-11
Duration: 16 min 2 s
Description: What’s next for the future of mobility? General Motors is on a mission to create a world with zero crashes, zero emissions and zero congestion.

Maven and something like Uber and Lyft is that you as a consumer are actually driving. But so how does that how does that fit into the overall landscape with Uber with Lyft? with other ride hailing as opposed to car sharing services? What what part of the market are you trying to fill So it's interesting. So Maven is the car- sharing business at General Motors. And our mission is really to help reshape car ownership by connecting communities to cars through technology. And the easiest way to think about Maven is to think of it as a digital platform that comes to life as an app. Service that people want to use it for business but need a car and don't have or they can be used for personal use, which is the car sharing side of it, and if they want to run a longer errand, or the field if they wanna go on vacation, And so we're really not. I would say we're part of the ecosystem of ride- sharing but providing cars to people who want to participate in that gig economy. And so that's how we're part of the, of the ecosystem. So they're actually a lot of them are the people that are delivering, Absolutely. Okay. okay. We have I would say we have two main offerings. One is for what we call it and it's actually called Maven [ UNKNOWN ]. It is for the people who are trying to participate in the economy and one to drive again for all these services. Then we have another offering that's called Maven car sharing, which is more for personal use. Mm hmm. And is that I mean, is that for the same type of consumer who would take who would use Zipcar who would do something else or what kind of what part of the market are you targeting? On the personal side it is and and on the on the business side The cars need to be certified by Uber and lift and they have to be in certain conditions and the drivers need to have a certain insurance policy to drive them. So it's a little bit different and another one A big difference between the services is usually on the ride sharing side. A lot of the people are driving them on a weekly basis, or even monthly because that's their living on the car sharing side. A lot of people are actually driving them either by the hour or by the day because it's just for short for short term, use. Honestly, Jen, I think the biggest and what makes it all fascinating is that the world is changing, right? The world of mobility is changing the options that we have available to us are changing. And what it looked like five years ago was very different and what it's gonna look like for five years from now it's very different and so Think it's all about options people having more options. We are experimenting with this car sharing world but you have micro mobility which is another major, in this face with what we call the transportation in that last mile, right. So for short distances How can you get there quicker? So bikes, scooters, so the options are just proliferating in a good way. Mm- hm, yeah. So all of the above in terms of what you're looking at. Everyone's talking about autonomy, autonomous vehicles How is that going to play a role in Maven's business, in GM's business? How is it already, sort of where are we in the timeline of that technology from your perspective? At GM we really believe in a world that's going to be all electric and autonomous. And it's really part of the vision that was mentioned of a world with zero crashes, zero emissions and zero congestion. And autonomous vehicles are gonna be a major driver of that. And so it's a journey towards this vision it we're not gonna get there tomorrow, but it is what drives all of our business and what guides us and so elect both electric vehicles so adoption of electric vehicles is picking up Autonomous vehicles are under development as we speak, and making great progress. And then in the meantime, we have things that we put on the road today that are really stepping stones to that. So for example, we have, we call them active safety features. Like Forward Collision braking where the car can detect that you're going to you're about to crash on another vehicle in front of you and actually automatically breaks or supercruise, which is Is our hands free driving technology. These are all things that when we are ready to put them into the market, we put them in the market but it's all towards getting us to again an all electric and all autonomous future. And I think if you stop to think about it, it the power of what the world can look like when we get there, I think [ UNKNOWN ] does From when we talk about zero crashes, when you stop to think about it. Every year you have over 1 million people who get killed in traffic accidents around the world and about 90 % of those are by human error. Right so if you are at if you're at a point where you have technology that actually prevents these crashes imagine how much safer the world can be right? On the emission side with electric vehicles. Today in the US cars and SUVs that are on the road today they account for about a fifth of us carbon emissions. Think of a world with will that will have only electric vehicles and how much cleaner that will be. Our CEO Mary Barra is is always talking about how we're going to see in the next five years, more transformation that we've seen in the last 50 And that is so true certainly for our industry but around the world and it's it's all being fueled by technology. And so it's it's just very exciting times. Yeah. So I mean, do you see in the next five years will we be will we reach that fully at The autonomous vision or is it further away than that? There will be stages of autonomous development. And it will start with pilots, right? And it will start with deployment in certain areas. And so, it's gonna take us awhile to get to an all- electric and all- autonomous world. But certainly, we're making great, great progress towards getting there. I wanted to read you something that at our Fortune Global Forum last month in Paris, the acting CEO of Renault Clotilde Delbos said, she said, with regard to the way that autonomous vehicles and the way that people will share them since you don't actually need a driver. Said you're gonna be using this car so much that the lifespan is going to be two to three years, not seven. You're going to need fewer cars, but you will need them more often. Do you agree? Are we gonna, cars wear out faster because people aren't driving them and what does that mean for for GM? It's, when you think of electric vehicles one thing that people don't really know, Or on familiar with is that electric vehicles require a lot less maintenance, right? You don't have to, you don't have you don't need oil changes, for example, right? And so the life of the vehicle can really be extended because of that, right? So what it's gonna mean is that people will be able to just use them a lot more often. And it's also because the Used to think about how it's gonna increase accessibility to people who today can't drive right. So be it because of physical disabilities or because of age and suddenly you don't need to be the driver right, there is a technology that is gonna take you where you need to go. And the thing that's really powerful Yeah, I want to come to the audience for questions in just a minute. So raise your hands, they'll bring you a paddle. There's someone over there Someone over there. Okay. So they'll bring you a paddle, please over here. And in the meantime though, I just wanted to ask you something because We're always talking about electric cars, and the assumption is, I guess you knew that gas is expensive and consumers are concerned about the environment and so everyone wants to move to electric, and then here on the other side of that you have this trend. People are buying pickup trucks, which seems to me kind of like the opposite of, all these environmental concerns and from maybe people are buying them cuz they actually like to drive them. How do you I mean, how do you balance working towards what's good for the environment with giving consumers what they actually want? So, I think the core here is to get to a point where people can choose any vehicle that they want that is electric, right? And we are clearly on that path and so it's not gonna be an issue because you are gonna have electric pick- ups. Right, and evil cyber truck and it BGM there's, you know, we'll have our own version of it. But I think this is really important to understand people have preferences and be it because of how they use it. So they need a pickup right because of the utility or because that's just what they like to drive. And people should not be limited because it's electric. And so, again, if you think about a future that is all electric, we're not gonna have these kinds of things. In the mean time, we're working really, really hard to get best fuel economy that we can in the vehicles that are Do you also consider what the infrastructure is necessary to support this? So how do you deal with cities, municipalities, from private entities to support charging to support rideshare? Like what are those services look like end to end. Is that something you do and how Yeah, so a couple of things. One is The beauty of being an independent mobility unit within a bigger organization that has General Motors is that we have access to a lot of resources from again, the bigger organization and one of them is public policy, right? And so we have a very. Good team, that we partner with a GM to help us with regulations right. And when his apologies to understand how we can work together which is really, really important in our space as as you know. And I will also say that from an easy perspective, there's no doubt that there are things that need to be addressed for adoption to really become a Predominant and infrastructure is a huge challenge that there is because that's the thing that is preventing a lot of people from buying NEV because they don't know where they're gonna be able to charge the car. And so we are working very, very hard at GM to build out this infrastructure. We have recently announce partnership with [ INAUDIBLE ] on our intent to create a partnership that will actually allow us to build this infrastructure. Because we understand that is really critical On the ridesharing side I will add to that, that we have our own fleet of Chevrolet Bolt EVs that are for gig drivers on the Maven Platform. And it's really, really interesting that the rideshare drivers love to drive EV vehicles. They absolutely love it. They know that they've tell us the passengers love it, so it's something that's differentiated for them when they go and pick up someone. The hesitation of how I charge and where do I charge goes away once they understand where they can go. And so, they map out their routes and they know where to go. We have seen, as you know from ride sharing, the mileage on the vehicles that these guys is tremendous, right? They're driving all day long, and doing several trips a day. And so with the Uber and Lyft drivers that are driving our EV vehicles, They've created so much demand that we have, [ UNKNOWN ] even have actually created with, built together with EVgo, so we have a partnership with EVgo, and we've built five dedicated stations, Maven stations between LA and San Francisco for a total of 34 dedicated chargers, Just for Maven, Ivy right chair drivers to utilize it. So I really believe that once the infrastructure is build, people are really going, the hesitation will go away. Cuz it's very very powerful. Yeah, we only have a little bit of time left. But I wanted to ask you, cuz Maven announced in the spring that it was going to exit. Eight of the 17 cities that it was in have you found you know, this is some that only works in certain cities or what are you learning through the process that about the markets that you want to be in? You know, it's, it really is. And Maven, we're all about testing, learning, pivoting, right? Which is really part of the cultural mindset that we've created for what I call this mini startup within the big jam [ UNKNOWN ] Organization. And we've learned that, you know, with the limited resources that we have, the growth potential isn't there in every market, right? And so we really needed to focus make sure that we focused where it made sense and where we saw

General Motors Drives for Change

Leadership

What’s next for the future of mobility? General Motors is on a mission to create a world with zero crashes, zero emissions and zero congestion. 