Can you trust it?

Trust continues to be the key. Anderson knows that must be earned, and trust is difficult to get back if it’s broken.

His approach is to put that customer trust first in what he does. For example, GM’s new infotainment system will have the ability to record from the cameras as a dash cam and store that video. And it can upload that video to GM’s cloud to access anywhere. But it is end-to-end encrypted, meaning that when it hits GM’s servers it’s in a format that GM can’t read. If law enforcement wanted to view the video, GM wouldn’t be able to help because it could not decrypt the video.

That is the type of trust that is absolutely needed when dealing with this type of personal data, because there is a convenience to a lot of this. But the opportunity for that data to be misused is also there—it wasn’t too long ago that GM was found to be selling customers’ data, often without their knowledge, to insurance companies.

We’ll want to experience GM’s new attitude in practice, of course, but hearing an automotive executive directly address that concern head-on was refreshing.

Car, take the wheel

This all leads into the fully autonomous functionality that GM is working on. Ars also spoke with Rashed Haq, VP of Autonomous Vehicles at GM, about the current state of the level 4 technology, and more importantly, when it’ll be safe enough for customers to use.

“We look at two key factors, safety and roadcraft,” Haq told me.

Safety obviously includes the vehicle’s occupants, but also the general public. And that requires millions of miles of testing in the real world but also digitally. Automakers like GM will never be able to prepare for every scenario, but it will combine training data with an open vocabulary to assess what information is there and make a driving decision based on that. Haq also reiterated the company’s expectation that when the car is driven by the computer, the responsibility falls on GM and the computer if something goes wrong due to a malfunction.