GM on 'Path' to Commercialize ‘Purpose-Built’ Ride-Share AV Next Year, Says CEO

General Motors is on track to commercialize next year, through its partnership with Honda, a “purpose-built” autonomous "ride-sharing" vehicle “in a dense urban environment, with safety as our gating metric,” said CEO Mary Barra on a Wednesday earnings call. Doing its AV development in downtown San Francisco “gives us probably the most exposure” to high-risk street and road “situations,” said Barra, when asked how GM measures AV safety. “We have done extensive work to understand how we will measure through actual road performance, simulation. We've gone back and looked at historical patterns as it relates to safety and we have a very well-defined plan of what we have to demonstrate to demonstrate that the AV is safer than a human driver.” Launching AVs in one city next year is "the first step in what will be a multiyear -- probably over decades -- transformation of how people move,” she said. A mile “is not a mile when you're doing AV testing,” Barra said. “The most complex miles that we're gaining experience in in San Francisco are very valuable, and so we're being efficient in driving the miles that we need to drive, getting the maximum learning.”