Dlaczego GM rezygnuje z Apple CarPlay, szef systemu Baris Cetinok

Today, I’m talking with Baris Cetinok, who has 1 of the longest titles of any individual we’ve had here on Decoder. He is, officially, General Motors’ elder vice president, software and services, product management, program management, and design.

Those are quite a few words that mean Baris is in charge of all the software in the cars that GM makes, which is simply quite a few cars. And if you’ve been following any of the drama in the planet of car software, you know it besides means Baris is the guy who has to defend GM’s decision to drop Apple CarPlay and Android Auto from most of its cars, especially EVs.

Now, Baris didn’t actually make that call, which GM announced in early 2023; he only joined GM about a year ago, after a stint moving services at Apple including Apple Pay. But it’s his occupation to make certain that GM’s software platform, which is called Ultifi, is so good that people won’t miss CarPlay. That is simply a tall order. all time we do a Decoder episode with a car person, we talk about CarPlay, and then we get an avalanche of emails from people who say they’ll never buy a car without it. See, we truly do read all the emails.

Baris’ main argument for ditching these smartphone projection systems is that GM needs more control over the user experience inside of the car in order to build any of the features and services he has on the roadmap — and that handing over the displays of the car to Apple and Google simply won’t let the company to innovate fast enough, so the company has to build its own user experience and software stack.

This is simply a acquainted argument and a acquainted approach. But it’s something we mostly hear from newer car companies — Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe said the same thing when he was on Decoder just a fewer months ago, but it’s very different coming from a legacy automaker like GM, which doesn’t have the luxury of starting from scratch and has to transition distant from letting a immense ecosystem of suppliers compose their own software for various parts of the car.

So I truly wanted to know how Baris is rethinking GM’s approach to software and the teams that build it. I especially wanted to know how he plans to ship and keep all of that software across GM’s many individual brands and models. Right now, Ultifi runs something called Google built-in, which kind of feels like having a giant Android tablet in the car. That means Baris has to deal with all the problems of giant Android tablets, like making certain they have adequate memory and processing power to last for a long time, even as the demands of users and software developers increase. This is simply a large task.

I’ve had versions of this conversation with the CEOs of car companies before, but Baris is in charge of building this stuff, and we got truly into the weeds of product and program management here. In possibly the biggest challenge of all, I asked him if anyone can actually explain all of Google’s various car platforms, and, well, you’ll hear his answer.

Okay, Baris Cetinok, GM’s SVP of software and services — and a full bunch of another stuff. Here we go.

This transcript has been lightly edited for dimension and clarity.

Baris Cetinok, welcome to Decoder.

I’m delighted to be here as a longtime listener and first-time contributor. What a delight.

I’m very excited to talk to you. There’s a lot to talk about. There’s a lot going on with cars, and there’s a lot going on with GM, specifically the software you oversee. You were at Apple for a while; you actually just mentioned to me that we met at the Apple Pay launch. That’s what you worked on at Apple. You came to GM just a small over a year ago, and as of June, you have an incredible fresh title at GM. I’m going to read you the full thing due to the fact that I want you to explain to me what it means.

You are GM’s elder vice president of software and services, product management, program management, and design. What does that all mean?

That’s a large question. So the hypothesis around our organizational structure is that we are a functional-oriented organization. We are somewhat emulating how modern technology, especially software-driven technology firms, are structured, which is that you start with a group of people who are in the product side of the house. These are the people who think about the what: “What should we build?” And besides the why: “Why should we build it?”

Their occupation is to be the voice of the client inside the company. They perceive to the customer, they perceive to journalists, they perceive to the zeitgeist, they do investigation themselves, read research, and make a thesis and, eventually, a hypothesis around, “Wouldn’t it be great, wouldn’t it be cool, wouldn’t it be amazingly interesting to do X?” That’s the what and why part; that’s what product managers do.

Then, you request to think about the how, and that’s erstwhile plan and engineering comes into the mix. I like the Disney word “imagineers.” These are the people who imagine and engineer things, and make those things real. You cannot ship PowerPoints, Excel spreadsheets, and Figma files. You request to turn them into real code or real beautiful designs. That’s engineering plus design.

And then program managers are the people who keep us honest, on time, on schedule, on budget, and remind us we request to make any decisions in a timely manner. They’re like the coxswain of the crew team. They’re the ones who are keeping the rhythm going, “Faster. Slow down, pay attention, more here.”

I don’t know about you, but I’m a immense sports fan. It is simply a squad sport, and these are the top players of a basketball team’s starting five. They each have their role, they know how to defer to each other, and they know how to pass the ball. But the goal is actually just to have a winning squad and build awesome products.

You’ve opened the door to an full hour-long conversation about program managers versus product managers. I want to talk to you about quite a few another things, but we do have quite a few product managers and people who build products who perceive to the show. What in your head is the real difference between a product manager and a program manager? due to the fact that that’s not a divided all company has.

Yes, and I get this question asked internally. I’ve been very fortunate, there’s been a fewer moments in my life where the right time, right place, and hard work met. I worked at Microsoft in the ‘90s and early 2000s.Then, I was part of the AWS group erstwhile it was just getting started at Amazon. Then, I spent a decade at Apple. 1 thing that’s common at all of these companies is that a strong program management culture met a strong product management culture. Product is the group that is expected to synthesize all those inputs we talked about, and put out a hypothesis. If you’re a product manager for, say, Super Cruise, you fundamentally articulate, “Wouldn’t it be amazing if…”

It starts with simple sentences like this. It’s not any dollar sign. It’s not any ethnographic survey that says, “Wouldn’t it be amazing with technology erstwhile you’re driving?” Warrior’s fan full disclosure: I drive from south of [San Francisco] to pursuit Center twice a week, and 90 percent of my mileage is on [Interstate] 280, and 90-plus percent of my time is on 280. I think, “Wouldn’t it be amazing if I can be little stressed during that period? I can do another things due to the fact that it can possibly be automated.” That’s the first expression of that hypothesis.

Of course, it’s easy to say these kinds of things. It could be sci-fi, or you can make it a reality. Engineers come in, but the program managers say, “I love your vision, but now we request to divide this up into bite-sized chunks, into real and demonstrable milestones so you can truly show advancement towards a real result and a date.” any companies have that drum beat in a very predictable way. all September, you must release a fresh phone. It sets that full rhythm and everybody works towards that. Those are the program managers.

The same thing applies here, right? erstwhile we set out to build an amazing car like the 2025 Blazer EV, you have vehicle program managers and software program managers coming together. All these thousands of parts come together by the thousands, and build specified a complex, beautiful device called a car. That’s why you besides request a strong program management culture to bring it all together, package it, and ship it. So without these 4 or 5 players playing together, it’s almost impossible to build amazing products and ship them on time.

I want to ask 1 more question on this. I’m trying not to get myself sidetracked into how curious I’m about this across the industry. You were at Apple. Apple is celebrated for not having conventional PMs, right? They have product marketing managers who are outbound to the customer. That’s very different from a bunch of another companies like Google and Meta.

How do you think about that at GM? due to the fact that you’re not truly marketing the software, right? You’re marketing a car. Then GM has multiple brands with multiple expressions of the software and the car platforms. That seems like a very challenging occupation description.

I think you made a good observation. Apple tries to find its unicorns who are good at product management and besides always has an eye for large storytelling. So I worked for a gentleman named [Greg “Joz” Joswiak] and afterwards Jennifer Bailey. They’re consummate product leaders who start with the client value proposition, turn it into a product, and yet ship it. So titles aside, good product managers always start with a client backwards story. You request to have an end communicative in mind. any companies like Amazon ask their product managers to compose fake press releases, virtually saying, “How would you like the press release to read if your product was being announced today?” So product managers actually do end up collaborating very closely with marketers due to the fact that they are the stewards of the product. They know the facts and the spirit of the product.

So in a company like General Motors, we are actually very akin to any of these another companies we’re talking about. We are a hardware, software, and services company. We built beautiful industrially-designed vehicles, amazing engines — be it electrical propulsion or interior combustion — amazing interior styling, plus software and service like OnStar that’s been around for 25-plus years now, all brought into 1 product. erstwhile you have these types of different domains and product knowledge, it’s crucial to come together.

For example, I have 2 cars right now. I get to drive fun cars; all six months I get to drive something different. 1 of my cars is simply a Hummer EV pickup truck, and the another 1 could not be more on the another end of the spectrum: a not-yet released 2025 CT5-V Blackwing with it’s a six velocity manual transmission. These 2 cars have amazingly different capabilities, with different software and capability stacks that come together. But it’s the same group of software people who are reasoning about what it takes to make a performance car and besides what it takes to make an amazing, hardcore off-road EV vehicle like a Hummer EV pickup truck. So, there is simply a way to make this kind of expertise and collaborate. That’s what we’re trying to accomplish here and doing it, I think, beautiful well. In the last year, we had good demonstrative examples of how they came together.

First of all, well done on the Blackwing. I believe that’s the last 1 they’re going to make, right? I’m very jealous of this.

I actually don’t know the answer to that, but I gotta say it’s an amazingly fun car.

I was going to say, if you didn’t have 1 Corvette in there, I was going to be mad, but a Blackwing is simply a reasonable substitute for a Corvette.

Actually, let’s talk about that. That’s a good framework for a bunch of questions I have here. I talked to quite a few people in the car industry, and there’s a general sense that we are undergoing what amounts to a platform change in the car industry, from ICE vehicles to EV vehicles. That creates the chance to rethink a bunch of experiences inside the car.

I would say this is more or little conventional wisdom. People buy an EV, they think the full car is going to be different. This is an chance to actually make things different. Whereas go from 1 gas car to another gas car, and abruptly the full thing’s different — that might be unexpected or strange. I’m not actually certain I buy that. I think if you buy a gas car and it has a much better infotainment system, you’re not going to be mad, right? If you buy a gas car and it has Super Cruise, I think people will be mostly happy.

But there’s a bunch of stuff under that, like possibly Super Cruise is easier to deploy on an EV due to the fact that you have finer-grain control over the motors, the braking system, or all the another stuff you might have mechanically in the car. Do you think that that’s true, that you request the EV transition to enable the user experience transition in the car, or are they just kind of coming along for the ride together?

First of all, I’m going to hire you as my interior evangelist. We can go on a full tour across the company and pitch what you just pitched. But I wholeheartedly agree with you. I think what happened is that the propulsion change induced people to reimagine what cars and vehicles could do. I don’t think it was the root origin of it; it was just a spark that made people pause and start questioning what else we can reimagine in the car. However, I don’t think it’s correlation versus causation. I agree with you, propulsion change should not be the origin behind whether we should have more integrated, profoundly aware experiences with our vehicles. 1 thing that I always effort to say to people is that this is 1 of the most vertically integrated products you could most likely buy in your life. Why wouldn’t we imagine a planet where the navigation system, accelerator, HVAC, and something like Super Cruise are all talking to each other?

If you and I were just imagining a car and we knew nothing about technology, we would just describe that — that it just works, right? Forget full autonomy, you would just be like, “Hey, present I’m going to drive from here to pursuit Center for the Warriors game. aid me get there.” That’s all you want. Today, we ask people to divide this into small subtasks, and you gotta do all of the parts. That’s the magic of software. We take that complexity away, and we make it simpler. We automate certain tasks, and we hide certain tasks.

The thing that gets me excited about working at GM is that I get to imagine how I can get into all the capabilities of this thing and make a profoundly integrated experience. And yes, I gotta say I learned it from the best. I mean, you look at a company like Apple who espouses deep vertical integration as 1 of the ways to make the most seamless experience. Case in point, we believe in the same thing for vehicles. and that’s why we believe we are a hardware, software, and services company alternatively than just a hardware company.

Apple is an interesting comparison. evidently there was a car task there, but it appears to have not gone well. Is there a reason why GM is able to turn into a software company faster than Apple is able to turn into a car company?

One thing I came to truly appreciate during my one-year tenure here is building cars is simply a complex system. Also, 1 thing that is crucial to appreciate is, yeah, you might get frustrated if you don’t get to post your favourite witty TikTok for an hr if there is simply a outage, but you don’t have that approval erstwhile you’re a safety-critical device that gets you from home to work, gets you to the infirmary for your child’s first birthday, or if you request to go rush and choice up your kids from school. This needs to work all time, all day, even in snowy days and hot days reliably and safely — nonstop. That’s an amazingly advanced bar. There’s very fewer industries like that.

Healthcare is 1 of them, right? Imagine if you’re a kind 1 diabetic and gotta usage those insulin pumps that monitor your blood sugar and decide how many milligrams of insulin to give you alternatively of in the old days erstwhile you had to prick your finger and do your own shots. Think about those kinds of systems. These things are life-critical, safety-critical things. So 1 thing you come to appreciate erstwhile you start building cars is that you request to get that right. That’s non-negotiable; that is occupation number one. Then, you start expanding it and say, “how can I make richer experiences?” due to the fact that you’re now in that vehicle.

I believe you can marry the right talent and the right players at a company. We at GM can make this kind of experience, and we have a good track record. Our cars have had software for decades now. What I think is changing is the software is now coming a bit more to the forefront in how you interact with the vehicle alternatively than ABS, which has been around for decades. That’s the magic of software, right? Emissions and how that’s controlled? That’s the magic of the software. How you take corners safely, that’s magical. There’s quite a few embedded software. I think what’s coming is just to the forefront and creating interactions. I believe we gathered the right group of people and the right talent to collaborate with the existing talent at GM to make those kinds of experiences. So I believe, in short, it’s possible.

When I look at the automotive manufacture broadly, there’s this set of startup players that have begun from an integrated platform, like Rivian and Tesla. You talk to the Rivian people and they’re arrogant of the fact that they built the car on ethernet, which most legacy car makers haven’t done. Then you talk to the large players like GM and Ford, and the conversation is all about reducing the number of microcontrollers across the car. We’ve got 45 ECUs across the car, we’re going to bring it down to 39, and that’s a immense victory, right? due to the fact that we’re reducing the amount of independent systems built by another suppliers.

Where is GM on this journey? I realize you’ve only been there for about a year, but it seems like you can’t get to building all of the products you want to build or all the experiences you want to build unless you dramatically re-architect the car.

This is the beauty and the hard but fun part of having specified a vast and rich portfolio like we offer to GM brands. We built a Hummer as well as sedans, the Blazer, Silverado, and Bolt. We have a very large portfolio that meets the needs of very different jobs that people want to get done. What that besides means is that this is simply a popular portfolio. It’s been around for a while. This is not a startup proof of concept with just 2 vehicles. That’s a small bit easier to get started since it’s easy to start from a blank sheet and say this is the fresh norm due to the fact that there is no preceding norm. So our occupation is just like any successful company. And we’re not the only ones, right? Think about Windows, which most likely runs on PCs that’ve been around for 4 decades as well as a PC you’ll buy tomorrow, and they request to power an ecosystem with thousands of permutations or millions of permutations.

We do support multiple electrical architectures due to the fact that that’s what we do. We do build the software for them, and we are always besides looking into the future for where else we can take it. The thing is, just like any company that’s working on its next electrical or electronic architecture, you are going to have a rollout that’s going to be progressive. You cannot flip an full portfolio with 3 brands and tens of different offerings on day one. Also, you don’t have to. That’s the thing. I think our customers have different needs, different expectations, and we are working through that responsibly.

My squad is already actively working on the next generations of architectures due to the fact that these take 5 years to a decade or longer. So we are on this continuum. erstwhile you get into, let’s say a 2024, 2025 Lyriq, you experience a different electrical architecture then you would have if you bought a Colorado ZR2 pickup truck, and that’s okay.

By the way, customers actually don’t request to know. Our occupation is to hide that complexity and those choices. All you want is simply a reliable car that you can easy and comfortably get directions from, that routes you in specified a way that you know erstwhile you request to charge, how much, where the charging stations are, that you can stream your music, answer your telephone calls, etc. But let us do our job. We’ll hide the complexity, and we’ll proceed to innovate and make things even better without you having to know it.

Well, the Decoder listeners want to know, so we’re going to stay right on this for 1 more second.

Let’s do it. Let’s unpack it.

When you talk about services broadly and what customers do or do not request to know about their cars, 1 of the main benefits of integrating car architectureI hear about all the time is that this is what enables over-the-air updates. The windows are malfunctioning, we’re going to ship an OTA and fix the windows. There’s a fresh feature we want to add to the car, so we can ship a feature and address all strategy in the car in 1 go. Drop the OTA and it’s done.

Tesla is celebrated for this; Rivian does this. Legacy car makers have struggled with this due to the fact that you’re integrating all of these systems from all these suppliers that talk to each other, but you can’t address them directly, or your suppliers gotta compose the code. That’s truly the thing I’m asking about here. Have you taken control of that full architecture or is GM inactive utilizing a bunch of different components from different Tier 1 suppliers?

I think the way you purposefully simplified it — I’m not saying this in a diminutive manner — is the most stark way of turning it into a binary. If you don’t have full control of everything, you don’t plan your own silicon, and you don’t do this, this, or this, you cannot make a device that’s updatable. That’s actually not true. I think in the industry, we request to be a small bit cautious about actively updating cars in our current architectures. Yes, possibly any of the pieces that request to be updated are harder to upgrade, but they’re not impossible to upgrade.

This is the minute — again, I always put the onus on creators, on makers — where it’s our occupation to figure out the hard part. Yes, it would be amazing if I was given a blank sheet present to simply plan a central compute with just 1 magical button. But if you were to unpack any consumer device you had in your pocket that existed for the last 15, 20 years, we all went through this kind of evolution, yet we always found a way to make them updatable and kept them current. It was harder to do internally, but you as a consumer hopefully never had to feel that difference. There is large promise in moving to, for example, IEP or ethernet-based architectures, in creating more central compute units to effort to get more flexibility and easier updates.

That’s on our roadmap, but I am not waiting for that day to arrive to be able to get you updates present in your Blazer EV, in your Lyriq, in your Hummer, in your Corvette. We’re doing that all day, all day. That’s why I besides want to be very clear that there is not a yes-no answer for if you must wait for the future to come, and have only modern companies that do it. We are doing that all day, and we are going to proceed to innovate on the electrical architecture. You will see it and experience it, but 1 day, hopefully you don’t even announcement that the silicon in your car changed due to the fact that I don’t think it should substance to you.

Let me ask you the Decoder questions. Again, you’ve only been there about a year, but there has been a restructuring. GM let go of about 1,000 people. Your function has changed. You have a counterpart in David Richardson who runs engineering at GM. How is this full group structured, and how do you account for the vastness of GM’s portfolio?

So it goes back to our beginning conversation about functional orientation. So my primary partner in crime is Dave Richardson, and he oversees our engineering squad as well as our IT. That’s a very crucial part because, like I said, they’re the imagineers. We request them and the designers to turn this into reality. 1 large change that happened is we’re now a primary peer group to our counterparts on the vehicle product improvement side. That’s actually immensely freeing due to the fact that now you have the people who are imagining the vehicle due to the fact that here, I usage this word internally too, we’re in “service” of the vehicle. That’s what we do. Software alone is not the goal. The goal is to make an amazing vehicle. You get into it and you take that ZR1 on the track, and our president Mark Reuss took this thing up to over 230 miles per hour.

There’s so much going on in that car to make that happen, but it means all of us came together to make that happen. That’s 1 large structural change, that software and services are now in a primary seat at the table alongside people who are building and designing the vehicles. The another thing is we’re actively looking into how we can be leaner, more efficient, and optimized for velocity due to the fact that there’s this debate that takes place: How large is besides large erstwhile you effort to decision fast? Eventually, the node connections in that network — the collaboration taxation — becomes greater than the benefit of adding 1 more individual to the nodes. That’s the thing that we always actively ask ourselves: How do we make certain this is simply a thin winning squad that is the right size with the right players and has the right amount of connections? Not besides much, not besides little.

But we besides want to be in a place where we say less yeses and make large ideas happen alternatively than say quite a few yeses and conflict in timing, scheduling, and another things. So a fresh position we’re bringing into the mix is 1 of the things that may be different. What it takes to build large software and services might be a small bit different, requiring different modus operandi than possibly any of the another parts.

You came into a structure, you changed the structure, and you have reduced the size of the structure in the interest of speed. What is the biggest difference between the structure you came into and the structure you have now?

One is just functional orientation. The second area is — and this is 1 of my strong beliefs — that I believe leading experts is simply a large model. You truly want to be the experts of at least most of the things you’re overseeing. Therefore, alternatively of generalists managing groups, we are actively hiring or uncovering experts within GM to lead the expert subgroup of their domain due to the fact that then there’s this truly healthy debate environment, call it dialectic, seeking truth. erstwhile you’re experts at something, you have this desire to always improve and question, but erstwhile you have generalists overseeing things, they can possibly make you mostly efficient, but they’re not going to be equipped to question the details.

So you have leading experts and then you have the another things we talked about, which is how do you make the trust environment where these experts trust their peer experts? They go, “You know what? I’m going to defer to you Nilay. You are better at communications and how to do better storytelling, how to make things pithier. Tell me how you think we should tell that story?” I could be dangerous and say, “Hey, I’ve been doing this for 3 decades, I know how to do PR.” But why should I do that? I have any of the best communications people working with me to advise me and to aid me accomplish that goal. I don’t think experts leading experts and experts trusting each another and passing the ball are fresh to GM per se, but we are iterating on those things and how we want to operate as a software and services group.

GM is simply a giant company. I think you study straight to CEO Mary Barra, the CEO.

But she has to oversee how the vehicle platforms are expressed, from GMC trucks to Chevy trucks to Buick sedans, to the full litany of GM’s cars, platforms, and brands. How do you break the tie if Cadillac wants a software feature, but Buick doesn’t?

I’ll start with, it’s hard,” but I call it “It’s hard work. Let’s do it. There’s definitely a designation that we have a capacity. Just like any product group and engineering group, you request to be honest about the capacity you have. You request to be thoughtful about what you can do and erstwhile in terms of quality. I always say to people, “You don’t just say no. You usually say erstwhile and how.” So, erstwhile you have specified a vast portfolio, you request to be commensurately sized on the software side. We won’t build an amazing vehicle that we committed to just due to the fact that the software group is besides busy.

However, erstwhile you’re looking at your capacity, software is not the only capacity constraint. You request to be thoughtful about suppliers. Let’s say you want to do something truly magical, and you request just the right camera or just the right sensor. Well, you request to besides negociate how you get that supply delivered to the plant, which besides has a capacity constraint. I have large friends who aid me navigate what it takes to build a vehicle, and we’re 1 of the constraints but besides the enablers.

So our occupation is to figure out if we are sized right. Do we have the right people looking at the right problems? How do we manage our capacity over multiple years — not just 1 year?Vehicle portfolios are a bit more like venture capital investment-style funds that request to manage or optimize your portfolio alternatively than a hedge fund that’s hyperactively trading. erstwhile you start imagining a vehicle like the ZR1, those ideas started most likely five, 7 years ago due to the fact that that’s what it takes to build a large car. Sometimes what you’re doing is just a fresh model year of an existing car. That’s a different task. Sometimes you’re doing a midlife cycle refresh of that car.It’s definitely a complex portfolio management task, but at the end, the products you end up building are so viscerally and emotionally fun. I just call it, “It’s hard work. Let’s do it.”

How do you break the ties though?

It’s a debate club, and what happens in debate clubs stays in debate club. So, the thing is we have specified amazing leaders like Mary, Mark Reuss, leaders who work for Mark, any of my brethren like Ken Morris, Josh Tavel on the plan side, Michael Simcoe. I mean, these people are legends in their own right in what it takes to build a multi-car, multi-brand advanced quality portfolio successfully and profitably. It’s a respectful debate club. I think there’s 2 options:. you either agree and commit or you disagree and commit. And you get to work.

This leads me right into the large Decoder question. You have quite a few decisions to make. What is your framework to make decisions?

I think I’ve already been sprinkling in any of the clues….

I can tell you’re a listener. I can always tell erstwhile the guest is simply a listener. You’ve been building your way here.

Look, this is simply a “started at home” kind of a moment, but it is true. I grew up in a household where questions were answered by questions. It was a very Socratic method of debate and dialectic. You sought truth, and you let the debate lead you to places with your own persuasions due to the fact that we all have this visceral first reaction that we think we know. It’s very crucial for a leader to always catch yourself and go, “I actually don’t know many things about this. Let’s do data intuition.” There’s this truly celebrated article I love. The header goes “Data and Intuition: Good Decisions request Both.” That’s what it is. It is both, but you debate it due to the fact that decisions are seldom so neatly binary. They’re always on a spectrum of gray, and they’re seldom profoundly wrong. They’re profoundly right. You debate it, you weigh it, and then, finally, it comes to a single term: conviction.

At the end, you request to make a bet and you request to have conviction. Now, this is your minute of making a bit of reality happen. It’s easy to respond to empirically observable reality due to the fact that then everybody can observe the same thing and come to the same conclusion. Life is easy, right? You do investigation and you do. The hard part is that the decisions we’re making present are crystal balling what’s going to happen in 5 years in terms of taste, desirability, zeitgeist, and technology. The only way you get there is to hopefully, subjectively, objectively, make good judgement calls. You make a call, you have conviction, and you put your efforts behind making that reality due to the fact that there’s quite a few things that are under your control. Let’s worry about those.

There’s this word that I picked up from my days at Amazon. It’s called controllable inputs. You worry about your controllable inputs. another things are going to happen, and you gotta react. With your controllable inputs, you make your decision and you commit and start executing. I always tell people that most of success comes from relentless iterative execution alternatively than any magical, amazing, superb light bulb idea. It’s incessant dedication and doing it over and over and over again. That commitment and conviction is what gets you there with decisions.

Okay, you opened the door with conviction, so I’m going to ask you this. This is what everybody has wanted me to ask you about. The large decision, which was made before you arrived at GM, was to drop smartphone projection like CarPlay and Android Auto from GM vehicles. I’m assuming that erstwhile you took the occupation at GM, you agreed with this decision. You surely haven’t undone it in your year there. Why make that decision? Why drop CarPlay and Android car from GM vehicles?

Because there was a belief and a hypothesis, which I genuinely believe in, that we are best positioned and owe it to our customers to make the most profoundly integrated experience that you can make with the vehicle. We are not shipping devices with just monitors; we’re not a monitor company. We’re building beautifully designed, complete thoughts and complete convictions. We say, “This car is designed to do the following things awesomely.” This is Silverado, this is what it stands for and this is what it does. Let’s get to it.

When you want to make something so seamless, it’s hard to think about getting into a car and going, “Okay, so I’m doing road trailering, but let me flip to a totally different user interface to choice my podcast. By the way, it’s a single app-obsessed interface — it’s inactive hard to believe. So I choice my podcast, flip back to trailering. Oh, now I can besides do Super Cruise trailering. Let me manage that. Then, wait, we’re now getting into possibly Level 3, Level 4 autonomy levels that should be profoundly integrated with talking to the map where the lanes lie. But wait a minute, the map that I’m utilizing doesn’t truly talk to my car.”

As a product person, you’ll never do that to yourself due to the fact that it’s virtually like, “Oh my God, I made my life so hard to make amazingly seamless experiences.” At any point, you request to make that bold decision and say, “I am not going to effort to accommodate and figure out how to make all of these work. I’m going to just burn the bridges and burn the ships and commit.” We are going to make a profoundly vertical, harmonious experience that works across the vehicle that is optimized for my vehicle.

I can appreciate erstwhile you’re in that one-off rental car that you don’t want to be driving but is the only car that’s available erstwhile you land, be my guest. usage projection. But the car that I researched for months and decided to buy for its interior, exteriors, its propulsion, and all feature that it does for me? We bought a Colorado ZR2 Bison. We love cars in our family; as you can see, we’re very outdoorsy. We go gravel biking and stone climbing in Yosemite with my son. I want that car to be actual and actual optimized for what I bought it for, not any lowest common denominator moment. That’s why it was not an easy decision to embrace erstwhile I joined, I’ll be very honest with you. At first, it’s a seemingly hard decision and possibly unpopular decision, but it is the right decision due to the fact that we are here building an end-to-end integrated product for you.

I just gotta say this: quite a few times erstwhile I land at the airport and I get in the rental car, it’s a white Chevy Malibu. Are you going to leave smartphone projection alone in the fleet cars that get put in rental lots?

I’ll take the proposition back to our elder leadership team. Let’s see what happens.

I’m just curious due to the fact that you’re describing 1 very circumstantial thing that people like smartphone projection for.

It is simply a large marketplace for GM. That’s the kind of fine-grained debate about smartphone projection I get from Verge readers and Decoder listeners. There are all these places where that thought sounds great, and there’s this full list of another places where that sounds horrible actually. erstwhile I borrow my parents’ car, I do not want to live in their Google account. I just want to send my Spotify to the screen.

It seems like you’re burning the bridges, but you’re burning the bridges to quite a few another experiences that people have in cars.

The 1 thing that I believe and encourage our partners — and we work very closely with Apple, Google, Amazon, Spotify, and others — to believe is that any of those pieces of information and preferences should be accessible to another devices that you choose to use. I don’t think they request to be locked in this walled garden of a single domain. I personally believe I should be able to take my podcast preferences from 1 podcast app to another. I always find it interesting that any of these very generic preferences I declare are locked and loaded, especially for non-specific content.

I appreciate that a certain show is only on Netflix, let’s say — respect — but most song music catalogs, podcasts, mapping information, your home address, your work address, these are beautiful generic pieces of information that you most likely want to just enable in any vehicle you walk into to make that experience more personal. So that’s 1 thing that our squad is besides working on. How can we actually get that information to power any bespoke experience that’s in a vehicle alternatively than having to relinquish the full vertical experience to a totally different one?

So I just spent a weekend test-driving a Blazer EV. quite a few fun. That full stack is built on Android, right? It’s Google services, the Play Store, apps. It wanted me to log into my Google account. That’s where all of that information came from. Then, it wanted me to log into my Spotify account, which is where a bunch of that information came from. At any point, you’ve kind of just put an Android tablet in the mediate of my car. Why build on Android? What you’re describing is simply a large vision. and then the way it’s expressed right now is, “Well, here’s Android.”

The way I look at it is if we were to do a startup today, we would most likely start playing with existing building blocks, right? If you and I were to do, let’s say, an overlanding app, you most likely wouldn’t come to me and say, “I have an idea. First we should get a data center and get a bunch of racks.” We would most likely go to AWS, and then you’d say, “Hey, for developing this app, we’re going to usage React. There’s any existing open-source libraries, let’s take those.” And let’s say we were besides in the business of utilizing any kind of map. We would be like, “Well, erstwhile we’re working on this platform, we’ll usage this map versus here where we don’t request to actually integrate a third-party map.” We’re not going to build our own map. Think about it that way.

As a software group and software developing group, we don’t gotta build all single building block. You have capabilities out there that are already given to you. Android is simply a building block; it’s an open origin system. In addition to that, Google provides building blocks that you can get into and build around. We’re working with another companies and seeing if they’ll be curious in building their building blocks and their apps into this environment where we get to make the experience.

So, I look at this as just enabling capabilities and wanting these moments you talked about,how you request to log in here to get the information from that ecosystem and make it more personal. I’m going to challenge my team. I think we should make that super magical and simple. Why can’t we just detect that you have your telephone in your pocket and do a very simple handshake alternatively of scanning a QR code? present that’s the most seamless way of doing it, but there’s many different ways to do it.

The same thing with if you log in once, what if you log into 1 plus another GM built car? Can we carry that over? Can we make 1 authentication strategy around GM ID that carries any of your another credentials? All of these are, in my opinion, solvable problems, and we’re now setting out to do that. It takes dedication and having this platform reasoning to be able to, 1 at a time and with dedication, remove all of these moments of friction you articulated. I agree with you, and we’re going to make it simpler and simpler.

One thing I’ll say though is, thankfully, most people don’t change their cars as frequently as you do. You’re changing your cars as frequently you most likely change your shirts. Most people buy a car and love it for three, 4 years. I utilized to say this in another places I work, most people don’t upgrade the operating strategy of their phones all week with a fresh build. Most of us hold any of our devices for longer. possibly you want you didn’t gotta do the setup routine, but you do it erstwhile and now it’s your car, it’s your vehicle, it’s your data, it’s your choices.

I want to come back to this timeline of 3 or 4 years. But first, I want to ask you a very challenging question — I will inform you, not all car executive who’s been on Decoder has been able to answer.

So this is the challenge: Can you name all of Google’s car platforms and describe what they do?

Let me give you the telephone number of a Google executive.

I don’t think they can do it either. I want to be very clear about this.

Look, I’ll say this, we have a great, tight partnership with them, and what I effort to do erstwhile you look at our–

No, no, no, you’ve got to try.

We definitely usage Google built-in and Google Automotive Services. And this is the thing: most people don’t know macOS is actually built on a version of Unix. So erstwhile you actually start splitting the layers of the cakes, there is definitely open origin or Linux, and Android is actually a Linux derivative, erstwhile you think about it. Let’s get all nerdy here. erstwhile you start looking at it, all of this is actually based on any another thing.

So we definitely usage Google Built-In, and we usage Google Automotive Services to make the experiences, but we make our own experience around it. With the Blazer EV, there are these moments to make that more personal. You can usage Google Maps with all the things that you’ve done in Google Maps before. If you would like, you can sign in with your Google account so your homework or the last search you did on your telephone besides just appears in your recents. So those are the kind of moments where we hook into Google services. But yeah, it’s hard to build popular building blocks like Google does or AWS does and keep all their branding and naming right. So I hear you.

What’s the difference between Google Built-In and Android Automotive? Which is the Android that runs–

Android Automotive Services.

Well, there’s Google Automotive Services, which is fundamentally the Play store and the apps, and then there’s Google Built-In, which is what you have.

And then there’s Android Automotive? I’ve been trying to keep this correct and clear in my head. I feel like you would know.

You’re chipping the software–

I do know, I do know. What I’m laughing about is that consumers don’t request to know these things–

But I request to know. I’m dying to know. This is why you’re here.

So I’ll give you an answer that is going to be little satisfying than you want. We have different model years and different brands, any of them have been with us longer and any of them are brand fresh vehicles. You get into a Lyriq, you get a different experience. So our goal, first of all, is to unify those experiences. That’s why I’m here, that’s why Dave is here, that’s why all of our teams are here: to actually take distant that complexity that you’re describing. You can actually see where in which vehicles we’re utilizing different combinations of services, but again, I think it’s beautiful opaque from a consumer perspective. I don’t think they request to know these differences, but I’ll point you to a large white paper that tries to explain it all.

Oh, I’ve read the white papers, I’ve seen the blog. I warrant you more people are going to send me more blog posts. I’ll just keep asking. 1 day we’re going to figure this out.

What does the deal with Google to usage its stuff look like? On a smartphone, that is the subject of beautiful ferocious regulatory interests, litigation, you gotta take Play services, you’ve got to usage its app, and they get a 30% split. Is it the same on the car?

The commercial details of it are definitely confidential. I don’t think I should be in the business of disclosing our partnership details. But from our position — just like you articulated — it’s complex in that there are different types of experiences and building blocks, and depending on how you usage those different blocks, there are different terms and conditions of how you integrate, operate, and update them.

So there is not a simple neat answer due to the fact that this is unlike Windows. This is not a standard Windows PC where you buy a Windows licence and you’re off to the races as an OEM. The cars we make are far more complex and capable, so therefore, a good condition of the cars are utilizing things that are not straight licensed from Google while any portions are straight licensed for Google — where Google Maps is Google Maps or Google Assistant is Google Assistant. all 1 of those permutations as they come together is different and unique.

The reason I ask that question is due to the fact that 1 of the reasons so many car makers are curious in taking control distant from smartphone projection and building their own user interfaces is what you have described: to offer more services, offer more subscription services in the car, offer more transactions on the screen, taking 30 percent of all transaction that happens on screen in the car, offering streaming services.

I’ve heard all version of these ideas, and if your economics include having to pay Google a fee for Android apps operating in your car on top of the fees you are extracting, it feels like there’s a real tension there, with Google as an operating strategy vendor or a services vendor wanting a fee or a percent divided on top of the 1 the GM wants from an app developer. And then the economics for an app developer to put an app on your car platform starts to fall apart beautiful fast.

We see this play out in smartphones, right? I think the day before we were speaking, Hulu said, “we’re not going to let sign-ups on iOS straight anymore due to the fact that we don’t want to pay Apple a 30 percent split.” I see this tension on smartphones with just 1 intermediary in Apple and Google. In your car there’s two, right? There’s Apple, here’s Google, and then there’s possibly GM.

So let me parse this question a small bit. I’ll start with that our primary motivation in all conversation we have is to first make a large client experience. I have this simple axiom: “great products besides usually make large businesses.” But you always start with a large product. In everything we discuss, we’re always trying to continuously optimize how we make a large experience for you. That’s it, that’s the primary goal.

The second thing is the kind of services we are building that I am truly excited about. The good thing is that we are a company that has already proven that model with OnStar. We have millions of subscribers who are utilizing it to extend their vehicle experience in a way that is expected from the vehicle, which is how do you make this safer for me? How do you aid me recover my car if there was always a theft? How do we aid you insure your car easier due to the fact that that is, again, integral to your car. Super Cruise is simply a large example, right? Super Cruise is always improving. We continuously add more and more roads, for example, which means we’re adding a concrete value. We just upped that to 750,000 miles across the U.S. That means we’re investing, so there’s value added and value created, so consumers are willing to pay for that subscription.

Those are the types of services I’m profoundly curious in: things that are extending my experience as a vehicle. I think that’s ours, that’s ours to build and ours to develop. Then there are any opportunities like you articulated around entertainment, around gaming, etc. But to me they come next. I really, and we are obsessed with extending the vehicle experiences first due to the fact that we know how to do that truly well and there are any domains.

I’m not here to compete with Spotify or Apple Music. They do a fantastic occupation servicing all of our music listening needs. We work with them, we bring their apps to our platform, and we run it. So I am not besides afraid about that part that you articulated: “How do you make value? How do you capture value? How do you divided the economics?” I think those are all solvable problems, but it all starts with the experiences I owe you as a consumer who buys a beautiful Escalade IQ in a period or two. What are the experiences I should create? erstwhile you get into that car, you’re going to see this pillar-to-pillar display with front control and back control. We have so many ideas of what experiences we can make for you there before we get into this area of gross and shared debates around a gaming app.

Earlier, you mentioned 3 to 4 years, and the reason that immediately lit up my brain is due to the fact that erstwhile listeners ask me about CarPlay, a thing they say to me is, “Well, if you’re going to put a giant Android tablet in my car, that means I have a giant Android tablet in my car and Android tablets get slow. 3 years from now, that will be slow, and with smartphone projection, it’s always moving off my phone, which is always fast.”

How do you deal with, “Okay, we’ve put all of the user interface on an SoC in a car that might gotta last for a decade?” Do you just over-spec them to make certain they have adequate headroom to last that long? Do you just presume people are going to turn them in on three-year leases? What’s the story?

You deal with multiple things. First of all, I’m a immense believer in creating elegant software. We’re not just simply moving any off-the-shelf Android and just conceding the full thing in a non-optimized way. We’re straight involved. We actually are utilizing that as a building block and we’re creating our experience. Therefore, the onus is on us. How do we make more optimal and optimized code? I’m a immense believer that you can continuously improve your code from the day you ship till the day you update it. We are on a continuous optimization journey. This thing doesn’t stay unchangeable and just collects on top of that additional debt.

In the another areas, you’re absolutely right. You do look at the compute investment you’re making and you want to give yourself headroom due to the fact that present we’re doing Level 2 [autonomy], which is, as I call it, “eyes-on, hands-off driving” with Super Cruise. But we are besides the company that has already invested in a full autonomous future, which is with Level 4. There is simply a region of Level 3 autonomy. Well, if you want to live on that journey, you want to make a strategy that has any headroom or is extensible and expandable as you add fresh capabilities. possibly you don’t want to over-provision from day 1 due to the fact that you’re not going to take advantage of it.

I never worked in this industry, but I am acquainted with it due to the fact that I was a gamer — I have little time to do gaming now — but the same thing applied erstwhile you were creating the next PS5 versus the PS6. You knew this platform was going to be there for many years to come, and you were trying to make just the right balance of provision with area for extendability, optimized software, and bringing content in that feels fresh, new, and always improving. That’s precisely what we’re doing with our vehicles. If you bought a Lyriq last year, the Lyriqyou’re driving present has newer software, is more optimized, and most likely moving faster than erstwhile you bought it due to the fact that we’re continuously improving it.

You mentioned another platforms. I always think about Windows telephone for any reason erstwhile people talk about platforms like this. Again, erstwhile listeners tell me why they like CarPlay, which they’re constantly telling me about why they like CarPlay, 1 of the things they say is, “All of the apps on my telephone support CarPlay.” I have 1 listener who told me he routinely switches between six and 7 apps in CarPlay while he’s commuting. It’s like podcast apps, ebook apps, all this stuff, and he’s just flipping. I find that incredible. I usage 2 apps, but so it goes.

That means you request the app support. If you want to sale that listener a Blazer or a Lyriq, he’s got to sit down, open the Play store — which is not large for discovery right now, I’ll tell you — and he’s got to search for all of his 7 apps and he’s got to find them all, which is the problem Windows telephone had, right? The volume of apps wasn’t there, and the library wasn’t there. Have you thought about solving that problem? Is that GM’s problem? Is that Google’s problem? How are you addressing that?

I think first of all, anything that happens in our cars is our problem. That’s how I look at it. There’s that uncovering that happy average between what are the most popular apps we believe should be there to complete your experience, and sometimes those ones — and this even applies present — that don’t even have apps. Even with your telephone you sometimes request to go punch through to the net and go to the browser and do it, right? These types of different domains be in our lives in another places too. We are working actively with the people we believe supply the core apps, possibly the top 10. It’s even more stark erstwhile you start talking to people. What are the must-have apps while you are driving or while you are a passenger erstwhile you’re riding in our vehicles? That list is actually far shorter than the long tail of things we do.

I think you’re touching up on an interesting area that I am besides curious in, which is if there is simply a way to bring vehicle-optimized versions of certain apps. Let’s say you’re a surfer, there’s this large app called Surfline. Wouldn’t it be fascinating if you had a vehicle-optimized version of the Surfline app that gave you information about what the tide conditions are, wind, etc. but in a smart way? Now, let’s go a small bit into the future. I believe this rabbit gap of vertical, micro-segmented apps is going to go under a change too, especially with voice interfaces becoming far more intuitive than always before due to large language models.

For me, I think the biggest change with large language models is that I can yet be understood by the device despite the fact I did not phrase myself perfectly. That device is going to be able to interpret my intent and give me answers. The reason I think we all default to a more contact user interface present is that we as users gotta do quite a few the disambiguation alternatively of the device knowing what you want. You are going through things, erstwhile all you want to know actually is this. You don’t request an app. If you want to drive to Aptos, California, to surf in an hour: “Tell me the surf conditions.” It’s a two-sentence answer. Do I truly request the app for that?

Apple’s solution to this is next-generation CarPlay where it will send more information to more screens, where it will aid car makers plan their center console, aid car makers plan the instrument cluster and another screens. Your old boss, [Greg Joswiak], is simply a large advocate of this. It’s been taken up a small bit, but not a lot. Have you looked at it? Would you usage next-gen CarPlay?

I look at almost everything. I’ve driven almost all competitor’s car under the sun, and I have all the devices that you most likely besides carry in your pocket to learn, test, and understand. We already made our decision about the experience we want to create, which is going to be a profoundly vertically-integrated experience that GM designs, builds, maintains, updates, and innovates on for our customers. That’s our direction.

There’s a truly interesting A/B test happening in the marketplace right now. You’ve got the Blazer EV, which has your approach. There’s the Honda Prologue, which is substantially the same platform, and the Acura ZDX, which is substantially the same EV platform. They support CarPlay. The Prologue is kind of a hit, I think a surprise hit for Honda. Are you keeping track of that? Do you think that’s attributable to CarPlay? Is that difference in branding?

Like I said, we’re looking at the competition, but we’re most likely a client and quality-obsessed company alternatively than competition-obsessed company. We’re definitely a highly competitive company, but it goes back to something we talked about: It’s about conviction. We have advanced conviction that this is the right way for us to take to make truly interior experiences for our customers. Like I said, an easier decision would be to ask, “Why make that effort?”

But we have a strong conviction that effort pays off in a better client experience. You get the most out of your vehicle due to the fact that now we’re the company that builds the vehicle and is besides creating the infotainment experience, the cluster experience, the app, and everything. We’re going to build that 1 day and possibly a voice assistant on top of it. The only way you can make that end-to-end magic is to have a strong conviction that you want to own all of these. It’s hard to make those seamless experiences. You’re going to always feel the seams, and I don’t think you should be in the business of feeling the seams erstwhile you buy a $30,000 to $100,000 car. It’s our occupation to make it beautiful and seamless.

We have quite a few listeners who say, “Look, I’m just not going to buy a car without CarPlay, and that’s fine.” Point them to something that will make them change their mind, that will make them reconsider. What’s something coming up where you’re going to say, “I can build you an experience that will make you reconsider?”

I don’t think you request to wait for the future. I think Super Cruise and how it integrates natively with the–

You can get Super Cruise on a [Cadillac] Lyriq with CarPlay today.

Well, the thing is that erstwhile you are utilizing the native integration with the map that knows where you’re going to be, what are the road conditions, what’s happening, where are the construction sites, and it ties it back to the battery strategy and says, “By the time you get to your destination and return, your battery’s going to be at this level. Here is the energy efficient way you can take.”

I cannot make those magical small dots connecting to each another if I had to go back and distant between a navigation app moving on another platform, and that’s the thing: you don’t request to wait for the future to make that. The another things that we want to make are akin things, especially erstwhile we start introducing Level 3 autonomy, hands off, eyes off, and even with robotaxis. That kind of integration is simply a prerequisite, not an optional feature.

Well, Baris, thank you so much for coming on Decoder. You got to come back so we can do a full hr on robotaxis, and a full hr of the difference between product and program management.

Nilay, I truly enjoyed our conversation. large questions, and I’m going to perceive to this episode too. I hope it turns out beautiful great.

We can all learn something. possibly we’ll get that blog post from Google. I’ll let you know. Thank you, Baris.

Thanks so much. Take care.