Three Things I Learned From Mary Barra

When I was in college, I played basketball and one of the lessons I learned is that things rarely go as planned. You need to be flexible.?In football, when you line up on offense, you can see the defensive landscape before the snap of the ball.?Basketball, though, is much more fluid.?Sure, we practice offensive plays,?but those rarely go exactly as planned because basketball defenses aren't always where you expect them to be.?They move, and flow, and adjust.?The game is fluid.?

That's the way the fleet industry is today, we’re moving, flowing, and constantly adjusting.?

At a recent customer event, 通用汽车 Chair and CEO Mary Barra joined me to talk about our EV future. I don’t have to tell you how valuable Mary’s time is, and what it meant that she was able to participate in this fleet event. This shows just how special and essential our fleet customers are to us, and how crucial they are in our company’s vision of creating a world with zero crashes, zero emissions, and zero congestion.

I wanted to share with you three things that I took away from my time chatting with the person Forbes magazine called “maybe the most consequential chief in today's auto business”!

1. Our electric journey isn’t some brand new endeavor. The automobile industry began over 100 years ago and changed the way the entire world viewed mobility and freedom. Well before we announced our Zero Crashes-Zero Emissions-Zero Congestion vision initiatives in 2016, we recognized this was truly a once in a generation type of transformation and didn't want it to happen TO us, we wanted to be the company that was inspiring change. Mary explained that we understand?the non-negotiables when it comes to owning electric vehicles?in the future?are a minimum of 300 miles of range?on a charge, affordability, and charging infrastructure, and laid out the ways we’re working to check all those boxes for fleet customers.
2. Autonomous vehicles are a gamechanger. By now you’ve probably seen this great video of Mary’s first driverless ride in our Cruise autonomous vehicle on the streets of San Francisco. She talked to me about the way the vehicle interacted with traffic, and particularly with a bicyclist that rode around them for over three blocks, and how she felt “gated by safety”. You could really see the excitement in her eyes as she talked about what technology like this would mean for the fleet industry and delivery services, and what it will mean for the independence of people who, for whatever reason, aren’t able to drive (think about an elderly parent or visually-impaired people). It was awesome to see our leader speak so passionately!
3. We’re just getting started. To use motorsports terminology (and Mary’s own words), General Motors is in the first lap of the electric vehicle evolution.?In fact, we’re only in the first TURN of the first lap in this transformation. Mary spoke about how committed we are to purpose-built EVs. We're not retrofitting existing vehicles as EVs, we're investing in having dedicated platforms. We believe we can be nimble, do things quickly, because with Ultium we’ve got a strong foundation. To those amazing customers that choose to team up with us on this journey, I promise that we’re going to find solutions and change the automobile and fleet industries!

Everything is changing, everything is in transition.?Customers no longer have the luxury of simply ordering vehicles for the next fiscal year. You need to be thinking 5 and 10 years ahead.?There's a ton of information to absorb, but we're here to help.?

We're here to make it happen for you.

We understand customers source fleet vehicles from different manufacturers, but it does not mean that all OEM's are built the same.?For nearly a decade now, we've been telling you that our goal is to provide great products, exceptional customer experience, and innovative business solutions.?Despite all we faced together the past two years, our team keeps focused squarely on our amazing customers and the three pillars that we believe separate us from everyone else.

Great products.

Exceptional customer experiences.

Innovative business solutions.