通用总裁：未来将是自动驾驶的天下

加利福尼亚州拉古纳海滩——通用汽车（General Motors）的总裁丹•阿曼对这家底特律汽车厂商在未来汽车中将要扮演的角色展现出了无比的自信。

在加利福尼亚州拉古纳海滩的《华尔街日报》（Wall Street Journal）D.LIVE科技大会上，阿曼表示：“我们在大量地发明创造。之前没有人这样做过。”他指的是大规模地部署自动驾驶汽车。

阿曼称，这样的规模很有意义，因为美国每年都有4万人因为交通事故死亡。把范围扩大到全球，死亡的人数则变成了120万。监管部门表示，其中95%都是人为错误导致。

阿曼说：“如果我们发展到了一定程度，可以大幅减少人为错误。这种技术未来可以实现的事情、带来的益处，将有助于解释世界为什么能借助该技术变得更美好。”

至于通用汽车？这家美国的汽车业巨头从事着销售汽车的业务。当人类不再驾驶汽车，这种商业模式如何展开？（通用汽车去年花费了超过10亿美元收购自动驾驶汽车技术的初创公司Cruise Automation。）如果优步（Uber）和Lyft这样的打车和汽车共享服务抑制了私人购车的需求，又要怎么办呢？

阿曼表示他并不担心。实际上，正好相反。他说：“美国的汽车行驶总里程，每年都有大约3万亿英里。而共享汽车行驶的里程只占了0.1%。这项服务仍然处在早期……非常早期。”

他说，向自动驾驶的转型会相当漫长。他承认：“显著的增长是建立在很小的基础之上。”不过，这确实是个“巨大的机遇”。通用汽车相信，通过提高交通的安全性，降低交通的成本，自动驾驶的总车辆里程或总载客里程会有所提高。

阿曼表示：“我们认为未来很大程度上会是自动驾驶的天下。”

译者：严匡正

LAGUNA BEACH, Calif.—Dan Ammann, the president of General Motors, is boundlessly optimistic when it comes to the Detroit automaker’s role in the future of cars.

“We are inventing a lot as we go. No one’s ever done this before,” he said at the Wall Street Journal’s D.LIVE conference in Laguna Beach, Calif., referring to the large-scale deployment of autonomous vehicles.

That kind of scale matters, Ammann said, because every year in U.S. 40,000 people killed in road accidents. Globally that’s 1.2 million people. And 95% of those are caused by human error, regulators say.

“If we can get to a point where we can make a significant impact on the human error part,” Ammann said. “That promise of what the technology can do and what benefit it will bring will help [explain] why the world will be a better place with this technology.”

And what about General Motors? The American automaking giant is in the business of selling cars. How does that model work when humans no longer drive them? (GM spent more than $1 billion on Cruise Automation, a startup that makes self-driving car technology, last year.) And if ride-hailing and car-sharing services like Uber and Lyft cut into the need for a privately owned vehicle?

Ammann said he isn’t worried. Rather, it’s quite the opposite. “Every year in the United States in total there are about 3 trillion vehicle miles,” he said. “Ride-sharing accounts for one-tenth of 1% of rides traveled. We’re still at the early stages…it’s very early days.”

It will be a long transition, he said. “Significant growth from a very small base,” he acknowledged. But a “big opportunity” nonetheless. By making transportation safer and lower cost, GM believes it can actually grow total vehicle miles traveled or total passenger miles traveled.

Said Ammann: “We see the future as being significantly autonomous.”