General Motors is overhauling the electrical and computational systems of its future vehicles. The goal is to deliver faster software, more capable automated driving features, and a custom, conversational AI assistant. The first result of this overhaul will debut in 2027 in the Cadillac Escalade IQ.
The U.S. automaker unveiled its plans at an event in New York City. A new electric architecture and centralized computing platform will become the foundation for all of its future gas-powered and electric vehicles starting in 2028. The next-generation supercomputer, Nvidia Drive AGX Thor, will power the compute unit. This is the result of an expanded partnership between GM and Nvidia that was announced in March.
This under-the-hood renovation is a required step for the company to introduce more services and features. These include a conversational AI assistant or a system that allows a car to safely navigate highways while the driver watches a movie. GM said it is working on these products and will bring them to future vehicles. The new architecture would also allow GM to improve vehicle performance, fix problems, or add new features to its infotainment systems via software updates. All of these improvements would make GM more competitive with Tesla and the rising threat of Chinese automakers.
GM Chief Product Officer Sterling Anderson said he has been focused on accelerating the rollout of this new architecture since joining the company. He stated it brings a lot of benefits, like increased bandwidth and a dramatic increase in computing power. This is part of Anderson’s broader goal of getting technologically advanced products into consumers’ hands faster. He said his focus is on speed, user experience, and profitability. Anderson told TechCrunch that the company is looking for opportunities to dramatically reduce vehicle development time from four or five years down to about two years.
Inside most modern vehicles, including GM brands like Buick, Chevrolet, Cadillac, and GMC, are dozens of small computers. These 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 took a ground-up, software-first approach, was able to outpace established brands with more computing power and the ability to roll out new features through wireless software updates, similar to smartphones.
Legacy automakers have spent years and billions of dollars trying to catch up. The industry widely agrees that part of the solution is to change the underlying hardware architecture to handle the growing computational needs of infotainment features, safety systems, and automated driving.
GM is taking a similar, although not identical, approach to the zonal architectures used by Tesla and Rivian. GM said it will consolidate dozens of ECUs into a unified computer core that will coordinate every subsystem in the vehicle in real time. That core will be connected to three aggregators. These are hubs that will convert signals from hundreds of sensors in the vehicle into a unified digital language and then route commands back to the correct hardware. The central computing platform will connect every system in the car, including propulsion, steering, braking, infotainment, and safety, through a high-speed Ethernet backbone.
GM calls the plan a full reimagining of how its vehicles are designed, updated, and improved over time. The company claims the end result will be vehicles with ten times more over-the-air software update capacity, one thousand times more bandwidth, and up to thirty-five times more AI performance for autonomy and advanced features.
GM has been on this software-centric path for several years. In 2020, GM rolled out an updated hardware architecture called Vehicle Intelligence Platform to allow for greater data processing power and over-the-air software updates. The following year, GM unveiled a cloud-based, end-to-end software platform that executives promised would make vehicles more capable and give drivers access to in-car subscriptions and new apps through over-the-air updates. That software platform exists in GM’s newest models and operates on top of the Vehicle Intelligence Platform architecture. GM continued its bid for a more software-centric vehicle in 2022 when it consolidated dozens of computers used for the infotainment system into a single computing platform. GM says this latest move builds on all of this previous work.