G.M. Unveils Its Driverless Cars, Aiming to Lead the Pack<br />is a much more entrepreneurial company now than it’s ever been,” said David E. Cole, chairman emeritus of the Center for Automotive Research in<br />Ann Arbor, Mich. “That has happened since the bankruptcy — the fact they are no longer wedded to doing things the way they did in the past.”<br />In the summer of 2015, Ms. Barra and other senior G. M.<br />executives began a series of visits to California, to study advances in self-driving cars<br />and to scout potential partners in developing autonomous models.<br />To emphasize the company’s progress, Mr. Ammann said the cars would be ready for consumer applications in “quarters, not years.”<br />Meeting that goal would probably give G. M., the nation’s largest automaker, a jump on other companies developing self-driving models.<br />“Dan said to me, ‘You want to take the chaos off the roads by introducing this great technology — can you really deny<br />that we would get there much faster working together?’ ” Mr. Vogt said.<br />“There were some capabilities we did not have and that we needed to have if we really wanted to pursue this.”<br />And it was up to Mr. Ammann — an industry outsider born in New Zealand who worked as a Wall Street investment banker before joining G. M.<br />— to deliver the crucial piece.<br />While Cruise began expanding its San Francisco operation to what is now nearly 400 employees, G. M.<br />set up a team of hundreds of engineers at its technical center in Warren, Mich., to support the self-driving program.
