DETROIT — General Motors CEO Mary Barra unveiled a new personal self-driving electric concept car from GM’s luxury brand Cadillac on Wednesday during the CES technology show.
The sleek two-passenger car, called InnerSpace, is part of Cadillac’s Halo Concept Portfolio, which debuted a year ago at CES with an urban air mobility vehicle and a shared autonomous shuttle.
Barra, during her prerecorded keynote address, also revealed that GM and its majority-owned subsidiary Cruise plan to offer a personal autonomous electric vehicle to consumers as soon as mid-decade.
That timeline is the most detailed since Barra last May said the company believes it could offer personal autonomous vehicles — marketed to individual consumers as opposed to fleet operators and ride-hailing services — “later in the decade.”
“In pursuing multiple paths simultaneously, GM and Cruise are gaining significant technological expertise and experience, and we are working to be the fastest to market with a retail personal autonomous vehicle,” Barra said Wednesday. “In fact, we aim to deliver our first personal autonomous vehicles as soon as the middle of this decade.”
GM’s time frame for personal autonomous vehicles may seem aggressive given setbacks in the development of self-driving vehicles in recent years. Cruise was initially supposed to commercialize an autonomous ride-hailing fleet in San Francisco in 2019 but indefinitely delayed those plans to conduct further testing and acquire needed permits.
Barra reconfirmed Wednesday that Cruise now expects those plans to be realized in the coming months. The company applied for the last permit needed to commercialize the operations in November.
