After public outcry, General Motors has decided to stop sharing driving data from its connected cars with data brokers. Last week, news broke that customers enrolled in GM’s OnStar Smart Driver app have had their data shared with LexisNexis and Verisk.
Those data brokers in turn shared the information with insurance companies, resulting in some drivers finding it much harder or more expensive to obtain insurance. To make matters much worse, customers allege they never signed up for OnStar Smart Driver in the first place, claiming the choice was made for them by salespeople during the car-buying process.
Now, in what feels like an all-too-rare win for privacy in the 21st century, that data-sharing deal is no more.
“As of March 20th, OnStar Smart Driver customer data is no longer being shared with LexisNexis or Verisk. Customer trust is a priority for us, and we are actively evaluating our privacy processes and policies,” GM told us in a statement.
Enlarge/ A 2024 Chevrolet Silverado EV WT at a pull-through charging stall located at a flagship Pilot and Flying J travel center, as part of the new coast-to-coast fast charging network.
General Motors
It’s understandable if you’re starting to experience AI fatigue; it feels like every week, there’s another announcement of some company boasting about how an LLM chatbot will revolutionize everything—usually followed in short succession by news reports of how terribly wrong it’s all gone. But it turns out that not every use of AI by an automaker is a public relations disaster. As it happens, General Motors has been using machine learning to help guide business decisions regarding where to install new DC fast chargers for electric vehicles.
GM’s transformation into an EV-heavy company has not gone entirely smoothly thus far, but in 2022, it revealed that, together with the Pilot company, it was planning to deploy a network of 2,000 DC fast chargers at Flying J and Pilot travel centers around the US. But how to decide which locations?
“I think that the overarching theme is we’re really looking for opportunities to simplify the lives of our customers, our employees, our dealers, and our suppliers,” explained Jon Francis, GM’s chief data and analytics officer. “And we see the positive effects of AI at scale, whether that’s in the manufacturing part of the business, engineering, supply chain, customer experience—it really runs through threads through all of those.
“Obviously, the place where it shows up most directly is certainly in autonomous, and that’s an important use case for us, but actually [on a] day-to-day basis, AI is improving a lot of systems and workflows within the organization,” he told Ars.
“There’s a lot of companies—and not to name names, but there’s some chasing of shiny objects, and I think there are a lot of cool, sexy things that you can do with AI, but for GM, we’re really looking for solutions that are going to drive the business in a meaningful way,” Francis said.
GM wants to build out chargers at about 200 Flying J and Pilot travel centers by the end of 2024, but narrowing down exactly which locations to focus on was the big question. After all, there are more than 750 spread out across 44 US states and six Canadian provinces.
Obviously, traffic is a big concern—each DC fast charger costs anywhere from $100,000 to $300,000 dollars, and that’s not counting any costs associated with beefing up the electrical infrastructure to power them, nor the various permitting processes that tend to delay everything. Sticking a bank of chargers at a travel center that’s rarely visited isn’t the best use of resources, but neither is deploying them in an area that’s already replete with other fast chargers.
Enlarge/ Much of the data GM showed me was confidential, but this screenshot should give you an idea of how the various datasets combine.
General Motors
Which is where the ML came in. GM’s data scientists built tools that aggregate different GIS datasets together. For example, it has a geographic database of already deployed DC chargers around the country—the US Department of Energy maintains such a resource—overlayed with traffic data and then the locations of the travel centers. The result is a map with potential locations, which GM’s team then uses to narrow down the exact sites it wants to choose.
It’s true that if you had access to all those datasets, you could probably do all that manually. But we’re talking datasets with, in some cases, billions of data points. A few years ago, GM’s analysts could have done that at a city level without spending years on the project, but doing it on a nationwide scale is the kind of task that requires the amount of cloud platforms and distributed clusters that are really now only becoming commonplace.
As a result, GM was able to deploy the first 25 sites last year, with 100 charging stalls across the 25. By the end of this year, it told Ars it should have around 200 locations operational.
That certainly seems more useful to me than just another chatbot.
Enlarge/ A GM Ultium battery pack like that found in the Lyriq.
Santa Fabio for General Motors
General Motors ended 2023 as the number one automaker in the United States, selling 2.6 million new vehicles during those 12 months. That’s a 14.1 percent increase from its performance in 2022, and comfortably eclipses the 2.3 million cars that Toyota sold during the same period. It had a strong year in terms of electric vehicle sales too—up 93 percent year-on-year.
But a quick look at the data reveals a somewhat less rosy picture. Yes, it was a banner year for GM EVs, with 75,883 deliveries in 2023. But only because of the Chevrolet Bolt EV and Bolt EUV. Chevy delivered 62,045 Bolts in 2023, a 62.8 percent increase on the 38,120 Bolts it sold in 2022.
But as Ars has detailed in the past, the Bolt is no more. Production ended at the Orion Assembly plant in Michigan on December 18, and GM is laying off 945 workers at the plant as it retools the factory to make electric trucks like the Chevy Silverado EV and GMC Sierra EV.
GM CEO Mary Barra has promised a new Bolt EV, this time using GM’s newer battery platform, known as Ultium. But the second-generation Bolt isn’t scheduled to appear until 2025 at the earliest.
Cheap, mass-produced cells?
GM has bet big on Ultium. In 2020 it revealed the new battery platform and told us that the new cells, developed together with LG Chem (which also produced the packs for Bolt) would drop below the $100/kWh barrier “early in the platform’s life.” $100/kWh is the point at which an EV powertrain reaches price parity with an internal combustion engine powertrain, at which point an EV should no longer cost several thousand dollars more than an equivalent conventionally fueled vehicle.
A spokesperson for GM told Ars that “cell production is going great, but the automation we use to pack cells into modules was not able to keep up,” and that “things are definitely improving.”
During the automaker’s Q2 2023 call with investors, it said that it had “deployed teams from GM manufacturing engineering to work on site with our automation supplier to improve delivery times,” and that it had added manual module assembly lines and was installing “more module capacity at all of our North America EV plants, beginning with Factory ZERO and Spring Hill this summer, Ramos Arizpe in the fall, and CAMI in the second quarter of next year.”
Three months later, GM told investors that “our battery module constraint is getting better, which helped us more than double Ultium Platform production in the third quarter compared to the second quarter. We are now in the process of installing and testing our high-capacity module assembly lines, which will continue into the first part of next year.”
GM also said that it believes the production constraint will have been overcome by mid-2024.
Software is hard
Unfortunately for GM, a lack of Ultium cells isn’t its only headache where new EVs are concerned. Last year the automaker revealed that it was dropping support for Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, the extremely popular phone-casting apps, from its EVs from model year 2024. Instead, its Ultium-based EVs would ship with a new infotainment system called Ultifi, built using Google’s Android Automotive OS (not to be confused with the phone-casting Android Auto).
Enlarge/ The infotainment system crashed more than once during our drive of the Blazer EV, and the problem is serious enough that GM issued a stop sale for the SUV as a result.
A spokesperson for the company told Ars that “GM is working quickly to address these issues and to implement a fix. Customers will be able to bring their Blazer EVs to Chevrolet dealers once they are notified that the related software update is available. Our engineering teams are working around the clock toward a solution.”
