GM Wants Your Car to Do Your Chores

Americans spent about 95 billion hours behind the wheel last year, traveling something like 2.76 trillion miles. On Wednesday, General Motors executives are outlining the future of automotive at the company’s annual GM Forward event in New York City, and they say their goal isn’t to reduce that number. After all, it’s a car company.

去年，美国人在方向盘后花费了约 950 亿小时，行驶里程约为 2.76 万亿英里。周三，通用汽车高管在纽约市举行的年度“GM Forward”活动上概述了汽车行业的未来，他们表示，其目标并非减少这一数字。毕竟，这是一家汽车公司。

But GM does want to make car time better. Or, as Chief Product Officer Sterling Anderson put it in an interview with WIRED, “make it more productive, make it more relaxing, make it more engaging. We’d like to make your vehicle a more central, more useful part of your life than it has been historically.” Your future car is sort of a personal assistant, and sort of a spouse, and sort of a tool, and sort of a best friend.

但通用汽车确实希望改善车内时光。正如首席产品官斯特林·安德森（Sterling Anderson）在接受《连线》（WIRED）杂志采访时所言：“让它更高效、更放松、更具互动性。我们希望让你的座驾成为你生活中比以往任何时候都更核心、更有用的部分。”你未来的汽车既像是私人助理，又像是配偶，既是工具，也是最好的朋友。

It’s a tall order. But in a raft of announcements this week, GM hopes to demonstrate that, armed with AI-enabled capabilities, the automaker is inching closer to that future.

这是一个艰巨的任务。但在本周发布的一系列公告中，通用汽车希望证明，凭借人工智能赋能，这家汽车制造商正一步步向那个未来迈进。

GM says it will roll out a new in-car AI assistant, called OnStar AI, starting with 2027 Cadillac Lyriqs. (The name borrows from the 30-year-old roadside assistance and security service, which has 12 million subscribers.) Paired with a new app, the system will start by letting drivers, for example, turn on their air conditioning with a voice command without navigating through a menu. Eventually, though, it might coordinate kid pickups and drop-offs depending on which spouse’s car is closer, Anderson says.

通用汽车表示，将从 2027 款凯迪拉克 Lyriq 开始，推出名为“OnStar AI”的全新车载人工智能助手。（该名称借用了拥有 30 年历史、拥有 1200 万订阅用户的道路救援和安全服务品牌。）安德森表示，配合一款新应用程序，该系统最初将允许驾驶员通过语音指令开启空调，而无需在菜单中进行繁琐操作。最终，它甚至可以根据哪位配偶的车距离更近，来协调接送孩子的事宜。

GM also says it will use AI to speed up new-vehicle development, eventually cutting its four- to five-year development time in half—the speed at which Chinese carmakers create new vehicles today.

通用汽车还表示，将利用人工智能加速新车开发，最终将其四到五年的开发周期缩短一半——这正是目前中国汽车制造商开发新车的速度。

The automaker plans to expand its “eyes-off” highway driving technology to its most popular cars, inching closer to its years-old promise of making a personal self-driving car. It previously said the system was coming to the Cadillac Escalade IQ in 2028. Today, the company’s Super Cruise feature lets drivers take their hands off their steering wheels on hundreds of thousands of miles of pre-mapped highways. Reaching true autonomy will take time, but GM isn’t ready to talk about that publicly. “This industry is rife with promises that were not fulfilled. I am not keen on making them,” Anderson says.

该汽车制造商计划将其“脱眼”（eyes-off）高速公路驾驶技术扩展到其最受欢迎的车型上，从而更接近其多年前做出的制造个人自动驾驶汽车的承诺。此前，该公司曾表示该系统将于 2028 年应用于凯迪拉克 Escalade IQ。目前，该公司的“超级巡航”（Super Cruise）功能已允许驾驶员在数十万英里预先测绘的高速公路上脱手驾驶。实现真正的自动驾驶尚需时日，但通用汽车尚未准备好公开讨论这一话题。安德森说：“这个行业充斥着未能兑现的承诺。我不热衷于做出这些承诺。”

But GM is taking a different approach from, say, Tesla. The electric carmaker sells a driver-assistance feature called “Full Self-Driving (Supervised)” that can navigate many highways and local roads but requires drivers to stay alert and ready to take over at any moment. That kind of system “presents the illusion of autonomy without its benefits,” Anderson says, who for a time led Tesla’s Autopilot program. If drivers can’t do other things while their car is doing most of the driving, it’s less useful and “comes with the direct expense of the safety of your vehicle and the people around you,” he says. “That would not be a responsible way to operate.”

但通用汽车采取的方法与特斯拉等公司不同。这家电动汽车制造商销售一种名为“全自动驾驶（受监督）”（Full Self-Driving (Supervised)）的驾驶辅助功能，它可以在许多高速公路和地方道路上行驶，但要求驾驶员保持警惕，并随时准备接管车辆。曾一度领导特斯拉 Autopilot 项目的安德森表示，这种系统“呈现出一种没有实际益处的自动驾驶假象”。他说，如果驾驶员在汽车进行大部分驾驶工作时无法做其他事情，那么它的用处就会大打折扣，而且“直接以牺牲你车辆及周围人员的安全为代价。那不是一种负责任的运营方式。”

GM’s method, by contrast, is to slowly expand “eyes-off” capabilities to more sorts of roads, letting drivers text or eat or watch YouTube first on some highways, and then on more highways, and then on local roads, and then maybe everywhere.

相比之下，通用汽车的方法是缓慢地将“脱眼”功能扩展到更多类型的道路上，让驾驶员先在某些高速公路上，然后是在更多高速公路上，接着是在地方道路上，最后可能是在任何地方，都能发短信、吃东西或观看 YouTube。

That’s when the automaker’s vision gets bigger and blurrier. The cabin, the company says in a blog post, can become a space to “relax, work, and unwind. … In time, this will pave the way for a future where your car can take on everyday errands,” the company says. The personal self-driving car will pick up groceries, drop off children, and then maybe even find a parking spot at the end.

这时，该汽车制造商的愿景变得既宏大又模糊。该公司在一篇博客文章中表示，车厢可以成为一个“放松、工作和休息”的空间……“随着时间的推移，这将为未来铺平道路，让你的汽车能够承担日常琐事，”该公司称。个人自动驾驶汽车将负责去取杂货、接送孩子，最后甚至可能自己找到停车位。

Urban planners and infrastructure experts have worried about this vision. If you lower the price of a car trip, in money and time spent driving, won’t everyone send their cars out for every task? Won’t the roads be crowded with pods full of people sleeping, emailing, and YouTubing while their vehicles slowly pilot them onward—or worse, cars with no one in them? Won’t cities become sprawlier?

城市规划者和基础设施专家对这一愿景感到担忧。如果你降低了汽车出行的成本（无论是金钱还是驾驶时间），难道每个人不会把车派出去处理每一项任务吗？道路上会不会挤满了载着睡觉、发邮件和看 YouTube 的人的车厢，而车辆则缓慢地载着他们前行——或者更糟的是，路上全是空无一人的车辆？城市会不会变得更加无序扩张？

Anderson says yes. If you have cheap, personal driving robots, “you will very likely incur more of those robots on the roads. And so there’s a lot of societal and infrastructural considerations to make here,” he says. But he argues we have time, and that cities take time to sprawl. “I wouldn’t call this an imminent thing, but it certainly is something we should be thinking about.”

安德森表示，确实如此。如果你拥有廉价的个人驾驶机器人，“你很可能会导致道路上出现更多的机器人。因此，这里有很多社会和基础设施方面的考量，”他说。但他认为我们还有时间，而且城市扩张也需要过程。“我不会称之为迫在眉睫的事情，但这绝对是我们应该思考的问题。”