Inside GM's fight against Google to win the multibillion-dollar race for driverless cars
Inside GM's fight to get to the future first.
Context & Ripple Effects
In early 2015, Bloomberg reported Google was building its own Uber competitor, likely fused with its driverless car program — a signal that the search company saw mobility services, not just car technology, as the prize. The backstory matters: years earlier, Detroit had rebuffed overtures from Chauffeur, the secret Google project that became Waymo, so this fight reopened a door the automakers themselves closed.
This piece frames GM, under Mary Barra, as the incumbent most determined to answer Google from inside the industry rather than cede the field — a posture that later produced Cruise and the pilot programs Barra detailed in her own account of GM's self-driving path.
First-order effects
- Google's ride-hailing ambitions turn Uber into an unexpected target: the same fleet that threatens GM's business model also threatens the ride-hailing incumbent Google was reportedly preparing to displace.
- GM faces a build-versus-buy decision under time pressure — matching Google means either scaling internal software capability fast or acquiring autonomy talent outright.
Second-order effects
- The race forces every major automaker to pick a lane between partnering with Silicon Valley and defending their own stacks, turning autonomy from an R&D line item into a board-level capital allocation fight for talent, sensors, and mapping data.
- Whoever controls the vehicle's software layer gains leverage over the cabin experience — a stakes dynamic that resurfaced when GM later bet on replacing Apple CarPlay with its own infotainment system to keep that layer in-house.
Third-order effects
- If autonomy matures into a service business rather than a feature, the industry splits into platform owners (Google-style fleets and software) and hardware partners — eroding the traditional automaker's hold on the customer relationship and reopening the question Barra herself addressed about the future of personal car ownership.
- Cruise's later retelling of its internal history, tools, and plans shows the durable outcome of this 2015 standoff: automakers institutionalizing software organizations inside car companies, a structure that persists regardless of which player wins any single deployment race.
The trend: Automakers and tech platforms are converging on driverless mobility as a software-owned service business, with each side racing to control the full stack before the market consolidates.