I asked Dave Richardson, GM’s SVP of software, how the company will avoid the enshittification of vehicles as it integrates more AI.
“There’s a lot of hype around AI right now,” he told me. “But there’s also practical use. I’ve been trying to focus the company on practical use cases. I think there’s a lot of pretty compelling things we can do to try to add real value.”
He gave some examples, such as a car knowing you have a meeting and setting the navigation appropriately or knowing that you’re going on a road trip, so it should queue up the appropriate media for your kids to stream in the back seat.
While the company is using Gemini at first, it eventually plans to have its own model on board. “With advanced processing in the car, we can handle interference on board so that it works in low-data-connection areas,” Richardson said.
Ultimately, GM will deploy its own LLM that knows about the car and is limited in overall parameters, Richardson told me. It won’t need to rely on the cloud to operate, increasing responsiveness in the car and keeping personal information with you, he said.
There are reasons to be skeptical, of course. One of my biggest concerns is how much driver data the car will collect. One reason GM doesn’t offer Android Auto or Apple CarPlay, the company has said, is that it wants to protect customer data. The owner must consent to any data sharing, GM said.
And although GM says it has made some internal changes to protect customer data, there have been some very public instances of the company selling data. “Data privacy and security is priority one for us,” Richardson told me about his work at GM. He said he has hired people specifically tasked with ensuring that customer data protection frameworks are in place.
“We have no interest in selling that data to third parties. When we think about data, whether it’s for Super Cruise or the AI, it’s really for us to develop the product and make it better. We don’t want to sell that data as the product itself,” he said.
I believe there’s space for a privacy-focused automaker, and while I’m not sure whether that will be GM, I hope that privacy and data protection are as important to the company in the future as it says it is today.
As for consumers wanting AI in their vehicles? GM thinks they do.
