We’ve got a special episode of Decoder today. I’m talking to General Motors CEO Mary Barra and new GM Chief Product Officer Sterling Anderson about a lot of big news the company just announced.
That includes a Google Gemini-powered AI assistant that’s coming to new cars, and an entirely new hardware and software platform coming to the Escalade IQ in 2028 alongside true Level 3 autonomous driving. There’s also a new home battery business and a new robotics division.
It’s a lot, and it all comes against the backdrop of President Trump’s trade wars, tariffs, and the expiring EV tax credit here in the United States, all of which have really upended the car business. Just last week, the day before I talked to Mary and Sterling, GM took a $1.6 billion writedown on its EV business against falling demand.
A lot of long-term plans about the EV transition are falling by the wayside like this. So, I wanted to know how Mary was thinking about it all, especially since she made some of the most aggressive EV platform bets among the legacy automakers several years ago. In one important way, that bet really paid off: GM has a full lineup of EVs running on a mature platform now. I myself just leased a Cadillac Vistiq SUV to take advantage of the tax credit before it expired.
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But the market has changed dramatically, and consumers are becoming far more price sensitive. The average cost of a new car in the United States just broke $50,000 the first time. And we’ve heard from a lot of car CEOs lately who say that’s a big problem. Most consumers don’t want to pay much more than $30,000 for a new car, and that means all of these costs need to come down.
So I asked Mary how she’s navigating the current moment, her company’s relationship with the Trump administration, and why she’s confident that EVs, autonomy, and AI are going to continue to help GM sell more cars — instead of just selling more expensive ones to a smaller group of wealthier consumers.
I also obviously took the opportunity to get deep into the details of the platform with Sterling, who spent several years at Tesla and was the co-founder of Aurora, the autonomous trucking startup. GM poached him back in May of this year, and now it’s his job to oversee the entire end-to-end experience of both gas and electric GM vehicles.
That means he has to answer for decisions around the hardware, software, and the interface, as well as all of the trade-offs that come with those decisions. I had a lot of very specific feature requests for Sterling, as well as some big-picture questions about what it means to think of these cars as platforms.
Of course, that means we spent some real time on GM’s big decision to ditch Apple CarPlay in Android Auto, whether that decision is paying off, and what all this looks like in the future is AI voice assistants and more capable autonomy come into the mix. That’s a whole lot of big Decoder themes in this conversation, and Mary, Sterling, and I really got into it. I think you’re going to like this one.
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