GM's New Product Boss Sterling Anderson Specializes in Self-Driving Tech
General Motors has a new vice president overseeing the product life cycle for its gas-powered and battery-electric vehicles.
Sterling Anderson comes over from the autonomous trucking startup Aurora and previously worked on Tesla's Autopilot.
Bringing on a VP with a background in robotics and autonomous driving could mean planned advances for GM's Super Cruise.
GM's newest executive hire is Sterling Anderson, recently brought over from Aurora, a trucking company working on driverless freight delivery. Before his eight years at Aurora, where he worked with one of the founders of Waymo, Anderson spent time at Tesla, including working on early Autopilot development. When he officially starts his new role at GM on June 2, he will oversee the end-to-end product life cycle for gas-powered and electric vehicles.
Anderson is educated in robotics, holding both a Master's and Ph.D in the subject from MIT. While studying at MIT, he developed a semi-autonomous-driving safety system, work which he continued in the private sector.
Aurora is currently running an SAE Level 4 autonomous driving system for heavy trucks, operating between Dallas and Houston. Its highly automated semi-trailers hit the roads earlier this month, after a comprehensive supervised-test rollout that hauled more than 10,000 loads of freight over 3 million miles of autonomous operation.
GM
Given his background, GM seems to be thinking hard about the future of its Super Cruise hands-free-driving system and looking forward to a greater level of autonomy. This doesn't necessarily mean that Anderson will be working specifically on an end goal of a fully autonomous vehicle, but possibly working on more effective Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) and increasing the functionality of Super Cruise.
Super Cruise is currently rated as Level 2 autonomy under SAE definitions, or partial automation. The Level 4 that Aurora's trucks are beginning to operate at is rated at high automation, meaning the vehicle is performing all steering and driving tasks, but it's geofenced to specific conditions.
Taking Super Cruise to Level 4 wouldn't mean a fully autonomous vehicle, but it would be sufficiently advanced for full eyes-off, hands-off operation in defined scenarios. Waymo is currently already operating at this level, so it's not far-fetched.
Waymo operates in Arizona and Aurora in Texas, both flat, dry places with defined parameters. So there's plenty of work to be done before a Level 4 Super Cruise-equipped Chevy Blazer can handle a stormy fall commute while its driver rests. But this hire might be GM getting one step closer.
Brendan McAleer
Contributing Editor
Brendan McAleer is a freelance writer and photographer based in North Vancouver, B.C., Canada. He grew up splitting his knuckles on British automobiles, came of age in the golden era of Japanese sport-compact performance, and began writing about cars and people in 2008. His particular interest is the intersection between humanity and machinery, whether it is the racing career of Walter Cronkite or Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki's half-century obsession with the Citroën 2CV. He has taught both of his young daughters how to shift a manual transmission and is grateful for the excuse they provide to be perpetually buying Hot Wheels. Read full bio
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