Electric Vehicles for Everyone, Not Just the Elite

Last weekend, I attended my 25th reunion at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. The class of 1990 gathered to reminisce and to learn from each other. Over the years, my classmates have gone on to do amazing things all around the world.

It was great to reconnect and our discussions reaffirmed for me that our world is changing more rapidly than ever before. The global auto industry will transform more in the next five to 10 years, than it has in the past 25 or 50 years.

So, when I sat down in New York with LinkedIn’s Dan Roth, we had a wide-ranging discussion on some of the most fascinating aspects of today – and tomorrow’s – automotive industry. We covered connectivity, intelligent driving systems, electric vehicles and more.

I hope you’ll take a few moments to watch the video, but here are some highlights from our conversation:

On Silicon Valley

I love the “anything is possible” attitude in Silicon Valley. We work regularly with a lot of companies there. But it’s not the only place where innovation comes from. We work around the globe. There are great places where we are working with new start-ups and college campuses.

On Chevrolet’s Electric Vehicles

With the next generation Volt, we actually took all the people who own it now and understand it and said, "How can we make it better?" And, so I'm excited to put the new Volt into the hands of existing customers, and then expand the customer base.

I think another great example is the Chevrolet Bolt EV, a vehicle that can go 200 miles on a charge and will be roughly around $30,000. It’s really providing that technology for everyone, not just the elite.

On Autonomous Vehicles

I like to call it intelligent driving systems because there's so much technology on the car right now to improve safety. That will continue to grow. With Cadillac, we're going to have two technologies on two different models: SuperCruise where you can literally take your hands off the wheel, feet off the pedals - at speed and in “stop-and-go” in certain conditions. Also, a Cadillac will be the first car (at least to our knowledge) that will have the module to have vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communications; those are all steps on the journey to autonomous. So we intend to lead.

As companies and individuals continue to reinvent themselves, the transformations in the coming decade must be bold and focused. For us, that means putting the customer at the center of everything we do.