GM taps AI to help match speed of Chinese rivals
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General Motors wants to slash the time it takes to develop a new vehicle in half, betting that artificial intelligence can help it compete with China's much faster automakers.
Why it matters: Chinese carmakers have a formidable speed advantage, allowing them to introduce new models and technologies faster than their Western rivals can respond.
The big picture: GM chief product officer Sterling Anderson acknowledges that Chinese automakers benefit from a deeply integrated supplier ecosystem that allows them to source common components quickly and efficiently.
- Western automakers lack that advantage, he told Axios.
- But he said GM has other advantages, including decades of accumulated engineering and manufacturing data it can leverage to accelerate development.
GM aims to leverage that data to shrink its traditional four-to-five-year vehicle development cycle to roughly two years by using AI and virtual engineering to streamline design, testing and manufacturing.
How it works: GM is using AI to replace what Anderson describes as slow, sequential engineering processes with faster, parallel development and virtual testing.
- For example, engineers were able to evaluate more than 300,000 designs for GM's new lithium manganese-rich (LMR) batteries virtually before building a physical prototype.
- That helped the team move from its first battery-pack concept to formal approval in just one month.
- GM is also using its vast records of component designs, material properties and manufacturing instructions to build digital models of vehicles and factories, enabling engineers to test changes before implementing them in the real world.
Between the lines: GM's enormous scale has historically made it difficult to change direction quickly. But that same scale has generated a treasure trove of data that could become an advantage in the AI era.
- "There is inertia in scale," Anderson acknowledged. But "with scale comes data."
- The challenge now is turning that data into faster development cycles — and ultimately better vehicles.
- "The faster you move, the more you iterate," Anderson tells Axios. "The more you iterate, the better the product gets."
The bottom line: GM isn't trying to copy China's manufacturing playbook. It's betting that AI can help it achieve similar speed through a different route.
