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Available at www.Alex Partners.com slash box. That's www.alxpartners.com slash V-O-X. In the face of disruption, businesses trust Alex Partners to get straight to the point and deliver results when it really matters. Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Neil I'm Matt Patel, Editor and Chief of the Virgin Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today I'm talking with Bearish Chetknock, who has one of the longest titles of any person who has ever been on Decoder.
He is, officially, General Motors Senior Vice President Software and Services Product Management, Program Management, and Design. That's a lot of words. But they all mean that Bearish is in charge of all the software and all the cards that are in charge of the product management and the software.
And if you've been following any of the drama in the world of cars software, you also know it means Bearish is the guy who has to defend GM's decision to drop Apple CarPlay in Android Auto for most of its cars, especially EVs. But it's now his decision to make sure that GM software platform, which is called Altify, is so good that people won't miss CarPlay.
of starting from scratch and actually has to transition away from letting a huge ecosystem of suppliers write their own software for various parts of the car. So I really wanted to know how bearish is rethinking GM's approach to software and the teams that build it. And I most especially wanted to know how he plans to ship and maintain all of that software across GM's many individual brands and models.
Right now, it's called Google Build In, which if you've used it, it kind of feels like having a giant Android tablet in the car. And that means bearish has to deal with all of the problems of shipping millions of giant Android tablets, making sure they get software and security updates and making sure they stay relevant even as the demands of users and software developers increase. This is a big task.
I've had versions of this conversation with the CEO's of car companies before on the coder, but bearish is in charge of building this stuff and we got really into the weeds of product and program management here. And in maybe the biggest challenge, I asked him if anyone can actually explain all of Google's various car platforms. You will hear the answer. Okay, bearish Chetknuck, GM's SVP of software and services, and a whole bunch of other stuff. Here we go. Bearish Chetknuck.
Welcome to the coder. I'm delighted to be here as a long time 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. There's a lot with GM, specifically the software which 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 about a year ago, just a little over a year ago.
Then as of June, you have an incredible title of GM. I'm going to read you the whole thing because I want you to explain to me what it means. You are GM, senior vice president, software and services, product management, program management, and design. What does that all mean? 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 usually 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 then also the why? Why should we build it? Their job is to be the voice of the customer inside the company. They listen to the customer. They listen to journalists. They listen to the zeitgeist.
They do research themselves, read research, and develop a thesis. Eventually, 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 need to think about how and that's when design and engineering comes into the mix because I like this Disney term called Imagineers. These are the people who imagine and engineer things and make those watts real.
You cannot ship PowerPoints, Excel spreadsheets, and Figma files. You need to turn this into real code, real to beautiful design, hence that's engineering plus design. Then program managers are the people who keep us honest on time, on schedule, on budget, and reminds us we need to make some decisions in a timely manner. They're like the coxen of a crew team. They're the ones who are keeping the rhythm going faster, slow down, pay attention, more here and here.
I don't know about you, but I'm a huge sports fan. It is a team sport and you design like the top players of the starting five of a basketball team. They each have their role. They know how to do first to each other. They know how to pass the ball, but the goal is actually just having a winning team and build awesome products. You've opened the door to an entire hour long conversation about program managers versus product managers.
I want to talk to you about a lot of other things, but we do have a lot of product managers who listen to the show. We have a lot of people who build products. What in your mind is the real difference between a product manager and a program manager, because that's not a split that every company has. I get this question asked internally. I always say to people, and I've been very fortunate. I always tell people, right time, right place, hard work meets a few moments in my life.
I worked at Microsoft in the 90s and early 2000s. Then I was part of the AWS group when it was just getting started at Amazon. Then I spent a decade at Apple. One thing that's common in all of these companies is a strong program management culture meets a strong product management culture.
It's the group that is really expected to synthesize all those inputs we talked about and put out a hypothesis and say, if your product manager for our super crews, you basically articulate, wouldn't it be amazing? It's not with simple sentences like this. It's not some dollar sign, it's not some ethnographic study says, wouldn't it be amazing with technology when you're driving for your span full disclosure? I drive from South of the city to Chase Center twice a week.
90% of my mileage is on 280. And 90% of my time is on 280. Wouldn't it be amazing during that period? I can be less stressed. I can do other things because it's, can potentially be automated. Well, that's that initial expression of that hypothesis.
Then you, of course, it's easy to say this kind of things could be sci-fi or you want to make it reality, then the engineers come in, but the program manager say, I love your vision, but now when it divides us up into bicellis chunks into real milestones, demonstrable milestones. So you can, along the way, truly demonstrate progress towards a real outcome and a date. Some companies have that drum beat in a very predictable way. Every September, you must release a new phone.
It sets that entire rhythm and everybody works towards that. Those are the program managers who do that. The same thing applies here, right? When we set out to build an amazing car like 225 Belayzer EV, you have vehicle program managers, software program managers coming together and all these thousands of parts come together by the thousands and build such a complex and beautiful machine called a car.
That's why you need also strong program management culture to bring it all together and package and then ship it. So we got these two, actually four or five players playing together. It's almost impossible to build amazing products and ship them on time. I want to ask one more question on this. I'm trying not to get myself sidetracked and how curious I am about this across the industry. You were at Apple. Apple is famous for not having traditional PMs, right?
They have product marketing managers who are outbound to the customer that's very different than a bunch of other companies, Google, Meta, what have you. How do you think about that at GM because you're not really marketing the software, right? You're marketing a car and then GM has multiple brands with multiple expressions of the software and the car platforms that seems like a very challenging kind of job description. Yeah, I think you have a good observation.
I call it Apple tries to find its unicorns who are good at product management and also has always an eye in how to do great storytelling. I work for a gentleman named Jaws and afterwards Jennifer Bailey. They're the consummate product leaders who starts with the customer value proposition and turn it into a product and eventually ship it. In that sense, titles aside, good product managers always start with a customer backwards story. You need to have an end story in mind.
Some companies like Amazon ask their product managers to write fake press releases. Literally says, what would you like the press release to read like if your product was being announced today? Product managers actually do end up collaborating very closely with marketers in companies because they are the stewards of the product. They know the facts and the spirit of the product. In a company like General Motors, we are actually very similar to some of these other companies.
We are talking about we are a hardware software and services company. We built beautifully industrially designed vehicles, amazing engines, be it electrical propulsion or internal combustion, amazing interior styling, plus software and plus a service like on start. It's been around now 25 plus years bringing to one product. Therefore, when you have these types of different domains and product knowledge, it is important to come together because for example, I have two cars right now.
I get to drive fun cars, a wrist six months, I get to drive something different. One of my cars is a Hummer EV pickup truck. The other one is not the other end of the spectrum. It's not yet released 2025, Ct5V Blackwink and it's a six-speed manual transmission. These two cars have amazing different capabilities, amazingly different software stacks in capability stacks and how it comes together.
But it's the same group of software people who are actually thinking about what it takes to create a performance car. So what it takes to create an amazing hardcore off-road EV vehicle like Hummer EV pickup truck. So there is a way to create this type of expertise and collaborate. That's why we're trying to achieve here and doing it pretty well. I think in the last year we have good moments of demonstrative examples so it came together. First of all, well done in the Blackwink.
I believe that's the last one they're going to make, right? I'm very jealous of this. Actually, I don't know the answer to that but I'll have to say it's an amazingly fun car. I'm very jealous. If you didn't have one Corvette in there as we mad but a Blackwink is a reasonable substitute for a Corvette, I think. Actually, let's talk about that. That's a good framework for a bunch of questions I have here. I talk to a lot of people in the car industry as you know, you're a listener of the show.
There's a general sense that we're undergoing what amounts to a platform change in the car industry from ice vehicles to EV vehicles and that creates the opportunity to rethink a bunch of experiences inside the car. I would say this is more or less conventional wisdom. People buy an EV, they think the whole car is going to be different. This is an opportunity to actually make things different. Whereas if you go from one gas car to another gas car and something, a whole thing is different.
That might be unexpected or strange. I'm not actually sure 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. If you buy a gas car and it has supercruise, I think people will be generally happy. There's a bunch of stuff under that that maybe supercruise is easier to deploy on an EV because you have finer grain control over the motors or the braking system or all the other stuff you might have mechanically in the car.
Do you think that that's true that you need the EV transition to enable the user experience transition in the car or are they just sort of coming along for the ride together? First of all, I'm going to hire you as my internal evangelist. We can go on a whole tour across the company, pitch what you just pitch. But I wholeheartedly agree with you, which is, I think what happened is the propulsion change induced people to reimagine what cars and vehicles could do.
I don't think it was the root cause of it. It just was a spark and made people pause and start questioning what else can we reimagine in the car. However, I don't think it's this kind of like correlation with this causation. I agree with you. Propulsion change should not be the causation of we should have more integrated, deeply aware experiences of our vehicles.
Because one thing that I always tried to say to people is like, this is one of the most vertically-intratated products you could probably buy in your life. Why wouldn't we imagine a world where the navigation system that accelerator HVAC and something like supercruise, they should all be talking to each other. That's actually, if you and I were just imagining a car we did that, no, nothing about technology, we would just describe that, that it just works, right?
I get into a car, I express to the car, forget full autonomy, just generally, hey, today I'm going to drive from here to Chase Center for Warriors Game. Help me get there. That's all you want. Now, today we ask people to divide this into little sub-tasks and you have to do all of the parts. That's the magic of software, right? We take that complexity away and we make it simpler. We automate certain tasks, we hide certain tasks.
The thing that I'm excited about working at GM is I get to imagine how I can tap into all the capabilities of this thing and create a deeply-integrated experience. Yes, I'll have to say, I learned it from the best, right? I mean, you look at a company like Apple who espoused a deep vertical integration is one of the ways to create 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 rather than just a hardware company. Apple is an interesting comparison. Obviously, there was a car project there. 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? That's a good question.
One thing I came to really appreciate in my one-year tenure here is a building cars is a complex system. Also, one thing that's important to appreciate, you might get frustrated if you don't get to post your favorite really witty TikTok for an hour if there is an outage. You don't have that permission when you're being a safety critical device that gets you from home to work, gets you to the hospital for your child's first birthday or you need to go right and pick up your kids from school.
This needs to work every time, every day, under snowy days, hot days, reliably and safely, non-stop. That's an amazingly high bar. There's very few little industries you appreciate. Healthcare is one of them. Imagine if you're Type 1 diabetic, those insulin pumps that monitors your blood sugar and decides how many MGs of insulin we should give you instead of in the old days, right? You have to prick your finger, do your own shots. Think about those kinds of systems.
These things are life-critical, safety-critical things. One thing you come to appreciate when you start building cars is that. You need to get that right. That's not negotiable. That is job number one. When you start expanding it and say, how can I create richer experiences because now you're in that vehicle? I believe with the right talent and with the right players and you can marry them up in a company, we can, at GM, create these kind of experiences. We have a good track record, right?
Our cars have had software for decades now. It just what's acting changing is the software is now coming a little bit more to the forefront in how you interact with the vehicle rather than ABS. It's been around for a decade. That's magic of software, right? Emissions and how that's controlled. That's magic of the software. How you take corners safely. That's magic of, there's a lot of embedded software. I think what's coming is just to the forefront and create that interactions.
And I believe we gathered the right group of people, the right talent, collaborating with the existing talent at GM and creating those kind of experiences. So I believe in short, it's possible. When I look at the automotive industry broadly, there's this set of startup players that have begun from an integrated platform, Rivian Tesla. You talk to the Rivian people and they are proud of the fact that they built the car on Ethernet, which most legacy car makers haven't done.
Then you talk to the big players, GM Ford, and the conversation is all about reducing the number of microcontrollers across the car, right? We've got 45 ECUs across the car. We're going to bring it down to 39 and that's a huge victory, right? Because we're reducing the amount of independent systems built by other suppliers. Where is GM on the street?
And 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, all the experiences you want to build unless you dramatically re-architect the car. Where are you there? This is the beauty and the hard-but-fun part of having such a vast and rich portfolio like we offer to GM brands. We built a Hummer as well as Sedans and the Blazer and 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 means is also, this is a popular portfolio. It's been around for a while, right? This is not a startup proof of concepting with just two vehicles. That's a little bit easier to get started and it's easy to start from a blank sheet and say, this is the new norm because there is no preceding norm. So our job is just like any successful company and we're not the only ones, right?
I mean, think about Windows. Windows runs probably on PCs that's been around for four decades as well as a PC you just bought tomorrow and they need to power a ecosystem of thousands of permutations, millions of permutations. What we do is we do support multiple electric architectures because that's what we do. We do build the software for them and we always are also looking into the future of where else can we take it.
The thing is just like any company who's working on their next electrical or electronic architecture, you are going to have a rollout that's going to be progressive. You cannot day one flip an entire portfolio of three brands and tens of different offerings on day one and also you don't have to. That's the thing that I think our customers have different needs, different expectations and we are working through that responsibly.
My team is already actively working on the next and even next next generations of architectures because this takes five to a decade or longer. We are on this continuum. We have already when you get into, let's say, 2024 or the year, your experience at different electric architecture, then you would have maybe a few products, Colorado, ZR2 pickup truck. That's okay. By the way, customers actually don't need to know.
Our job is to hide that complexity and the choices all you want is a reliable car that you can easily and comfortably get directions from. It routes you in such a way that you know when you need to charge, how much, where the charging stations are, that you can stream your music, answer your phone calls, et cetera, et cetera, and new experiences. But let us do our job. We'll hide the complexity and we'll continue to innovate and make things even better without always having to know it.
Well, the Dakota listeners want to know. So we're going to stay right on this one more. Let's do it. Let's unpack it. When you talk about services broadly and what customers do or do not need to know about their cars, one of the main benefits of integrating the car architecture that I hear about all the time is this is what enables over the year updates. The windows are malfunctioning. We're going to ship an OTA and fix the windows. There's a new feature we want to add to the car.
We can ship a feature. We can address every system in the car in one go, drop the OTA and it's done. Tesla is obviously famous for this, Ruby, and does this. Legacy car makers have struggled with this, right? Because you're integrating all of these systems from all these suppliers that talk to each other, but you can't address directly in that way or your suppliers have to write the code. That's really the thing I'm asking about here.
Have you taken control of that entire architecture or is GM still using a bunch of different components from different tier one suppliers? I think the way you purposefully simplified it, I'm not saying this in a diminutive manner, is probably the most stark way of turning into a binary. If you don't have full control of everything and you don't design your own silicon and you don't do this, this, this, this. You cannot create a device that's real at the updateable. That's actually not true.
That's the thing that I think in the industry, we need to be a little bit cautious that there are today, we are actively updating our cars in our current architectures. And yes, maybe some of the pieces that needs to be updated are harder to upgrade, but they're not impossible to upgrade. And this is the moment, again, I always put the owners on, on creators, on makers. It's our job to figure out the hard parts. And yes, it wouldn't be amazing if I was given a blank sheet today.
I will design this to be just simply a central compute and this and that and it's just one magical button that happens, but if you were to unpack any consumer device you had in your pocket, it exists, let's say, for the last 15, 20 years, we all went through this type of evolution, yet we always found a way to make them updateable and kept them current. It was just harder to do internally, but you as a consumer, hopefully, never had to feel that difference.
So yes, there is a great promise of moving to a more IP slash, for example, Ethernet based architectures, creating more central compute units to try to get more flexibility and easier updates. That's on our roadmap, but I am not waiting for that data arrive to be able to get your updates today in your blazer EV, in your lyric, in your Hummer, in your Corvette. We're doing that every day all day.
And that's why I want to be also very clear that there is not as yes or no answer of, you must wait for the future to come and therefore desire the only modern companies that do it. We are doing that every day and we are going to continue to innovate on the electric architecture and you will see it, experience it, but one day, hopefully, you don't even notice that the silicon in your car changed because I don't need to matter to you. We need to take a quick break. We'll grab back.
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We're back with GM's SVP of software and services bear Chetknock to dive into the decoder questions, which I promise will get us to the biggest question of all. CarPlay. Let me ask you to decoder questions. Again, you've only been there about a year, but there has been a restructuring. You've let go about a thousand people. Your role has changed. You have a counterpart in Dave Richardson who runs engineering at GM.
How is this entire group structured and how do you account for the vastness of GM's portfolio? It goes back to opening conversation about functional orientation. So one of my primary partnering crime is Dave Richardson and he oversees our engineering team as well as our IT. That's a very important part because like I said, we need them to turn to steady Imagineers. We need them and designers to turn us into reality.
One big change that happened is we are now a primary peer group to our counterparts on the vehicle side, vehicle product development side. It's actually immensely freeing, right? Because now you have the people who are imagining the vehicle because here I use the sport internally too. We're here in service of the vehicle. That's what we do. Software standalone is not the goal. The goal is to create an amazing vehicle.
You get into it and you take that ZR1 on the track and our present Mark Royce took this thing up to 230 plus miles per hour. There's so much going on in that car to make that happen. That means all of us came together to make that happen. That's one big structural change that software and services are now a primary seed at the table alongside people who are building the vehicles and designing the vehicles. That's one of the big changes.
The other thing is we're definitely actively looking how we can be leaner and more efficient and optimized for speed because there is this debate that takes place. How big is too big when you try to move fast? Eventually the note connections in that network, the collaboration tax becomes greater than the benefit of adding M plus one more person to the notes. That's the thing that we always act the Oscar ourselves.
How do we make sure that this is a winning team that is lean, that is just right sized with the right players and has the right amount of connections? Not too much, not too little, but also we want to be in a place where we say fewer yeses and make great ideas happen than say a lot of yeses and struggling, timing, schedule and other things.
That's one of our things that maybe a different, a new perspective we're bringing into the mix in what we believe, what it takes to build great software and services might be a little bit different. We call it a different Modus O'Pron die than maybe some of the other parts. You obviously came into a structure, you have changed the structure, you have reduced the size of the structure and the interest of speed.
What is the biggest difference between the structure you came into and the structure you have now? One is this functional orientation. The second area is, this is one of the beliefs that I have strongly is I believe experts leading experts is a great model. You really want to be the experts of at least most of the things you're overseeing than a few.
Therefore, instead of generalists, generally managing groups, we are actively hiring or finding experts within GM to lead the subgroup of experts of their domain. Because then there is this really healthy debate environment, right? This I call it like dialectic, the seeking truth nature.
When you're experts of something, you have this desire to always improve and question by when you have generalists overseeing things, they can make you maybe generally efficient, but they're not going to be equipped to question the details. You have experts leading experts and then the other things, something we talked about, which is how do you create the trust environment that this experts, trust their peer experts? They go, you know what? I'm going to defer to you in the lie.
You are better at communications in how to do better storytelling, how to make things easier, tell me how do you think we should tell that story. I could be dangerous enough and say, hey, I've been doing this for three decades. I know how to do PR, but why should I do that? I have some of the best communications people working with me to advise me and to actually help me to achieve that goal.
So that other experts, experts leading and experts trusting each other and passing the poll, I don't think they're new to GM per se, but those are the things we are iterating how we want to operate as a software and services group. GM is a giant company. I think you report directly to 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 whole litany of GMs, cars and platforms and brands.
How do you break the tie if I don't know, Cadillac wants a software feature, but Buick doesn't. I'll start with, it's hard. I go, it's hard work and let's do it. It is hard work. There's definitely a recognition that we have a capacity. Just like any product group and engineering group, you need to be honest about the capacity that you have. You need to be thoughtful about what you can do and when with quality. I always say to people, you don't just say no, you usually say when and how.
So I think when you have such a vast portfolio, one, you need to be commissarantly sized on the software side. We're not going to not build an amazing vehicle that we committed to because software group is just too busy. However, when you're looking at your capacity, software is not the only capacity constraint, right? You need to be thought about suppliers because you let's say want to do something really amazingly magical and you need that just that right camera or that just right that sensor.
Well, you need to also negotiate how do you get that supply to be delivered to the plant, which also has a capacity constraint that some other experts in the company, I have great friends who help me navigate all of these pieces of what it takes to build a vehicle. And we're one of the constraints and also enablers. So our job is are we right sized? Do we have the right people? We can't the right problems.
And also how do we manage our capacity over multiple years, not just one year because a vehicle portfolios are a little bit more like venture capital investment style funds and managing optimizing portfolio rather than a hedge fund who's hyperactively trading. When you start imagining an amazing vehicle like ZR1 that ideas started probably five, seven years ago, right? Because that's what it takes to build an amazing great car.
Sometimes what you're doing is just a new model, you're of existing car. That's a different task. Because you're doing a mid-life cycle refresh of that car. So all of these, it's definitely a complex portfolio management task. But at the end, the products you're ending 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? How do we break the ties? It's debate club and what happens in debate club stays in debate club.
So no, this is the thing, right? We have such amazing leaders like Mary, Mark Royce, leaders who work for Mark. Some of my veterans like Ken Morris, Josh Tavill on the design side, Michael Simcoe. I mean, these people are legions in their own right of what it takes to build a multi-car multi-brand portfolio successfully high quality, profitably. It's a respectful debate club and at the end, I think there's two options I call it.
Either agree and commit or you disagree and commit and you get to work. This leads me right into the decoder question. You have a lot of decisions to make. What is your framework to make decisions? I think I've been already sprinkling some of the clues. I can tell you a listener. I can always tell when the guest is a listener, even building your way to here. Look, this is one of those things. It all 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 that your own persuasions, because we all have this visceral first reactions that we think we know. It's very important 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 really famous article I love, the headline goes, data or intuition.
And yes, both. And that's what it is. It is both, but you debate it. Because decisions are rarely so neatly binary, right? They're always on a spectrum of gray and they're rarely deeply wrong. They're deeply right. You debate it. You weigh it. And then finally comes to a single sentence for me, conviction. Single term, conviction. At the end, you need to make a bet and you need to have conviction. And now this is your moment of a little bit making reality happen.
It's easy to react to empirically observable reality. Because then everybody can observe the same thing and come to the same conclusion. Life is easy, right? You do research, research says, and you do. The hard part is, decisions we're making today are crystal bowling, what's going to happen in five years in taste. Exorbitability, zeitgeist, technology. The only way you get there is hopefully you're subjectively, objectively make good judgment calls, but you make a call.
You have conviction and you put your efforts behind making that reality. Because there's a lot of things that are under your control. Let's worry about those. There's this term that I picked up from my days at Amazon. It's called, Contrable Inputs. You worry about your control inputs. Other things are going to happen and you have to react. But with your control input, you make your decision and you commit and start executing.
I always tell people, most of success comes from relentless iterative execution, rather than some magical, amazing brilliant life ball by DIA. It's incessant dedication and doing it over and over and over and over again. That commitment and conviction is what gets you there with decisions. You open the door with conviction. I'm going to ask you this. Everybody has wanted me to ask you about the big decision, which was made before you arrived at GM.
Was the decision to drop smartphone projection like CarPlay and Android Auto from GM vehicles. I'm assuming that when you took the job at GM, you agreed with this decision. You certainly haven't undone it in your year there. Why make that decision? Why drop CarPlay and Android Auto from GM vehicles?
Because there was a belief in a hypothesis, which I generally believe in is that we are best positioned as well as we owe it to our customers firsthand to create the most deeply integrated experience that you can create with the vehicle. We are not shipping devices with just monitors. We're not a monitor company. We're building beautifully designed, complete thoughts, complete convictions. We say this car is designed to do the following things awesomely. This is Silverado.
This is what it stands for. This is what it does. Let's get to it. When you want to create something so seamless, it's hard to get into a car and go, okay, I'm doing the highway trailering, but to pick my podcast, let me flip the totally different user interface. Also, by the way, it's a single, still, hard to believe, single app-obsessed interface. I pick my podcast, flip back to trailering. Now I can also do supercruised trailering. Let me manage that.
With weight, we're now getting into potentially level three, level four autonomy levels that should be deeply integrated with talking to the map where it lanes live. But wait a minute, the map that I'm using doesn't really talk to my car. It's a product question. You'll never do that to yourself because it just literally, like, oh my God, let me make sure I make my life so hard to create amazingly seamless experiences.
At some point, you need to make that bolt decision say, I am not going to try to accommodate and try to figure out how to make all of these work. I'm going to actually just burn the bridges and burn the ships and go, we're committed. We are going to create a deeply vertically integrated harmonious experience that works across the vehicle that is optimized for my vehicle.
I can appreciate when you're in that one-off rental car that you don't want to be driving, but that's the only car that's available when you land in whatever destination you land in. Be my guest. Use projection. But the car that I researched for months and decided to buy for its interior and exterior and its propulsion and airway feature that it does for me, like we bought a Corota canyons ER to Bison without cars in our families. You can see we're very outdoorsy.
We're like going gravel biking and rock climbing and you're simping with my son. I want that car to be true and true optimized for what I bought it for, not some least common dominated moment. So that's why when I joined, it was not an easy decision to embrace. I'll be very honest with you because it's a seemingly at first hard decision and maybe on popular decision, but it is the right decision because we are here building and to integrate the product for you.
I just have to say this, a lot of times I land at the airport and 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 suggestion back to our senior leadership team. I'm just curious because you're describing one very specific thing that people like smartphone projection. Yeah, you're right. It is a big market for GM.
That's the kind of fine grain debate about smartphone projection I get from verge readers and decoder listeners. Hey, there are all these places where that idea sounds great and there's this whole list of other places where that sounds horrible actually. When 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 a lot of other experiences that people have in cars. That one, I think my response is the one thing that I am trying to encourage partners, and we work very closely, be it with Apple, Google, Amazon, Spotify and others, is I believe some of those pieces of information, pieces of your preferences, I believe should be also accessible to other devices that you choose to use.
I don't think they need to be locked in this wall garden of a single domain. I personally believe I should be able to take my podcast preferences from one podcast app to another. I always find it interesting that some of these very generic preferences I declared are locked and loaded, especially for non-specific content.
I appreciate a certain show is only on Netflix, let's say, respect, but most of song music catalogs, most podcasts, most mapping information, your home address, your work address, I mean, these are pretty generic pieces of information that you probably want to just enable in any vehicle you walk into to make that experience more personal.
So that's one thing that our team is also working on, how can we actually get that information to power any bespoke experience that's in a vehicle ready not having to relinquish the full vertically into experience to a totally different experience. We need to take another quick break, we'll be right back. Support for decoder comes from AT&T. What does it feel like to get the new iPhone 16 Pro with AT&T next up anytime?
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We're back with GM's SEP of software and services, Bearish Chetknock, discussing the company's decision to drop Apple CarPlay and making sense, or at least trying to make sense of Google's various Android car platforms. So I just spent a weekend test driving a Blazor EV, a lot of fun. That whole stack is built on Android, right? It's Google services, it's a Play Store, it's apps, it wanted me to log into my Google account. That's where all of that information then came from.
And then it wanted me to log into my Spotify account, which is where a bunch of that information came from. At some point, you've kind of just put an Android tablet in the middle of my car. My build on Android, right? Well, you're describing as a big vision and then kind of the way it's expressed right now is, well, here's Android. The way I look at it is just like, you know, if we were to start up today, we will probably start playing with existing building blocks, right?
We will look at like, you and I have worked with you to let's say, I don't know, a overlanding app. You probably wouldn't come to me and say, I have an idea. First, we should get a data center and get much of racks. We will probably go to AWS. And then you will say, hey, look, you know, for developing this app, we're going to use React. There's some existing libraries and open source. Let's take those. And let's say we were also in the business of using some kind of a maps.
We would be like, well, when we're working on this platform, we'll use this maps versus here. We don't need to actually go and get a third party map integrated. We're not going to build our own map. Think about it that way. You know, as a software group and software developing group, we don't have to build every single building block. You have capabilities that are out there that's already given to you. Like Android is a building block.
It's an open source system in addition to that, Google provides additional building blocks that you can tap into and you can build around. And you know, we're working with other companies and see if they'll be interested in building their building blocks and their apps into this kind of an environment where we get to create the experience. So I look at this as just enabling capabilities.
And one thing, this moment, you talked about like I had to log in here to get the information from that ecosystem and make it more personal. I'm going to challenge my team and I do. I think we should make that super magical and simple. Why can't we not just detect you have your own in your pocket and we do a very simple handshake instead of scanning a QR code? Today, that's the most seamless way of doing it, but there's many different ways of doing it.
And the same thing with if you log in once, what if you log into n plus one other GM built car? Can we care that over? Can we create one authentication system around GM ID that carries some of your other credentials? So all of these are, you know, our solvable problems and we're now setting out to do that. It takes dedication and having this platform thinking to be able to one at a time and with dedication to remove all of these moments of friction you are taking.
I agree with you and we're going to make it simpler and simpler and simpler. And one thing I'll say though is thankfully most people don't change their cars as often as you do. You change your cars as often. You probably change your shirts. Most people buy a car and love it for three, four years. And I used to say this in other places I work. Most people don't upgrade their operating system of their phones every week with a new built most of us, you know, hold some of our devices longer.
That initial moment of potential, maybe the setup routine feels, I wish I didn't have to do it. But once you did once, now it's your car, it's your vehicle, it's your data, it's your choices. I want to come back to this time when I have three years. I've been thinking about this a lot. But first I want to ask you a very challenging question that I will warn you, not every car executive who's been on decoder has been able to do this. I'll listen to this is a challenge.
Can you name all of Google's car platforms and describe what they do? Let me give you the phone number off just to get off of a Google executive. I don't think they can do it either. I want to be clear about this. Look, I'll say this, we have a great tight partnership with them. And what I try to do, when you look at our, you got to try, which ones do you use? We definitely use Google built in and Google automotive services. And in the depths of everything, this is the thing, right?
Just like, I don't know what people don't know. Mac OS is actually built on a version of Unix and a Linux, et cetera. So when you actually start, you're splitting the layers of the cakes, there is definitely open source or Linux and Android is actually a Linux derivative. When you think about it, let's get all nerdy here. And when you start looking at all of it is actually based on some other thing.
So what we use is we definitely use Google built in and we use Google automotive services to create the experiences. But one step we took is we definitely create our own experience around it. When you got into Blazer EV, there are these moments to make that more personal. So you can use Google Maps at all the things that you've done in Google Maps before. So therefore, there's a moment and say, if you will like, you can sign in with your Google account.
So therefore, your home work or last search that it on your phone also just appears in your recent. So those are the kind of moments where we hook into the 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 rights. So I hear you. What's the difference between Google built in and Android Automotive, which is the Android Automotive services?
Well, there's Google Automotive Services, which is basically the Play Store and the apps. And then there's Google built in, which is what you have. Correct. And then there's Android Automotive. I'm literally been trying to keep this correct. I've been trying to keep this clear in my head. It seems very, I feel like you would know. Like you're, no, I do know what I'm laughing about is, but this is the thing, right? Most of the customers don't need to know anyone. I need to know.
I need time to know. This is why you're here. So I'll give you an answer that is actually going to be even more or less satisfied than you want, which is because we have different model years and different brands, you do have and some of them have been, you know, been with us longer. Some of them are brand new vehicles. You get into a lyric, you get a different experience. So our goal is, first of all, to unify those experiences. That's why I'm here today. It's why David's here.
That's why all of our teams are here to actually take away that complexity of that you're describing. And so you can actually literally see where in which vehicles we're using different combinational services. But again, I think from a consumer perspective, it's pretty opaque. I don't think they need to know all these differences. But I'll point you a great white paper that tries to explain it all. Oh, I've read the white papers. I've seen the blog post.
I guarantee you more people are going to see more blog posts. I'll just keep asking. One day, we're going to figure this out. What does that deal with Google look like to use their stuff, right? On a smartphone, that is a subject of pretty ferocious regulatory interests, litigation. Right? You have to take place services. You got to use their app. They get a 30% split. Is it the same on the car? Commercial details of it. It's definitely, it's something confidential.
I don't think I should be in the business of disclosing our partnership details. But from our perspective, again, just like you're articulating, I know it's complex. In the sense of there's different types of experiences and different types of building blocks. And depending on how you use those different blocks, there's different terms and conditions of how you integrate, how you operate it, how you update it. So there is not a simple need answer because this is an unlike Windows, right?
This is not a standard-based Windows PC and you buy a license of Windows and you're often the races as OEM. The cars we create are far more complex and capable. So therefore, a good portion of the cars is using things that are not directly licensed from Google and some portions are directly licensed for Google and Google maps is Google maps or Google assistance, Google assistance. So everyone of those permutations that I come together is different and unique.
The reason I asked that question is one of the reasons so many car makers are interested in taking control away from smart run projection and building their own user interfaces is what you have described. Is offering more services, offering more subscription services in the car, offering more transactions on that screen, taking 30% of every transaction that happens on a screen in the car, offering streaming services. I've heard every 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 that Google is an operating system vendor or a services vendor is going to want a fee or want to percentage split on top of the one the GM wants for an app developer. And then the economics for an app developer to put an app on your car on your platform starts to fall apart pretty fast.
And we see the spy out in smartphones. Like literally I think the day before we are speaking, Hulu is saying we're not going to allow signups on iOS directly anymore because we don't pay that 30% split. On smartphones I see this tension with just one intermediary in Apple and Google in your car, there's two. There's Apple and there's Google and there's potentially GM.
Let me parse this question a little bit and I'll start with first our primary motivation in every conversation we're having is actually it comes from first credit great customer expanse. It's simple axiom it's called great products also usually make great businesses but you always start with a great product. So in everything we're discussing we're trying to always continuously optimize how do we create a great experience for you. That's it. That's the primary goal.
The second thing is the type of services that I am really excited about that we are building and the good thing is we are accompanying or the proven that model with on start we have millions of subscribers that is using to extend their vehicle expanse in a way that is
expected from the vehicle right which is how do you make the safer for me how do you make prevent or help me recover my car if there was ever a problem of theft how do we help you ensure your car easier because that is again integral to your car super cruise
is a great example right super cruise is ever improving we continuously are adding more and more road for example that means there's a in continued value we're adding we just up that to 750 thousand miles across the US that means we're investing therefore there's
value added value created and therefore consumers are willing to pay for that subscription those are the type of services I deeply first interested in which is that is things that are extending my vehicle experience as a vehicle I think that's ours that's ours to build
and ours to develop then there is some opportunities like you articulated around entertainment around gaming etc but to me they come next and we are obsessed with extending the vehicle experiences first because we know how to do that really well and there are some domains you know I'm
not here to compete with Spotify or Apple music they do a fantastic job of servicing all of our music listening needs and you know we work with them we bring their apps to our platform and run it so I am not too concerned about that part that you articulated how
do you create value how do you capture value how do you split the economics I think those are all solvable problems but it all starts with what is the experiences that I think I owe you as a consumer who buys a beautiful escalate IQ in a month or two and what are
the experiences I should create when you get into that car you're going to see this pillar to pillar display front control back control we have so many ideas of what experience we can create for you there before we get into this area of a revenue shared debates around a gaming app.
I mentioned three to four years the reason that immediately lit up my brain is you know when listeners ask me about car play a thing they say me all the time 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 like three years from now that will be slow and with smartphone projection it's always just running off my phone which is always fast.
How do you deal with that how do you deal with okay we've put all of the user interface on an SOC in a car that might have to last for a decade do you just over spec them to make sure they have enough headroom to last that long do you just assume people are going to
turn them in on three year leases what's the split you do with multiple things first of all I'm a huge believer of creating elegant software we're not just simply running some off the shelf Android and just conceding the entire thing in an unoptimized way we're
directly involved we're actually are using that as a building block and we're creating our experience so therefore first the owners is on us how do we create more optimal and optimize code and I'm a huge believer of you can continuously improve your code from
the day you shipped till the day you update it so that's one thing we are on a continuous optimization journey so this thing doesn't just stay stable and just collect a bird you know on top of that additional debt the other areas you're absolutely right because you do
look at the compute investment you're making and you want to give yourself headroom because today we're doing l2 which is I call it iZone hands-off driving with super crisp but we are also the company who already invested in a fully autonomous future which is
the future of future which is with al4 level 4 autonomy there is a zone of l3 level 3 autonomy well if you want to live on that journey you want to create a system that is maybe has some headroom or extensible expandable as you add new capabilities because maybe you don't want to
over-provision from day one because you're not going to take advantage of it you know one industry that you know I never worked at but I am familiar because I'm also I was a gamer I have less time to do gaming now but the same thing applied when you were creating the next ps5
for sps6 you knew this platform was going to be there for many years to come and you were trying to create this just the right balance of provision just right with room for extendability optimise software bring content in and it feels fresh new and always improving that's exactly
what we're doing with our vehicles today when you buy a you know but if you bought a lyric last year the lyric you're driving today has newer software more optimised probably running faster than the new bot day you bought because we're continuously improving it you know you mentioned other
platforms I always think about Windows phone for some reason when people talk about platforms like this again when listeners tell me why they like car play which they are constantly telling me about why they like car play one of the things I say is all of the apps on my phone support car
play I have one listener who told me he routinely switches between six to seven apps in car play while he's commuting and it's like podcast apps ebook apps like all this stuff and he's just flipping but I find that incredible I use two apps but so it goes yep that means you need the app support
right if you want to sell that listener a blazer or a lyric he's got to sit down he's got to open the play store which is not great for discovery right now I'll tell you and he's got a search for all of his seven apps and he's got to find them all which is the problem Windows one had right the
volume of apps wasn't there the 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 anything that happens in our cars is our problem that's how I look at it I think there's that finding that happy medium of
what are the most popular apps we believe really should be there to complete your experience and there's going to be sometimes that one I mean this even it applies today there's some experiences that are that they don't even have apps right even in your phone sometimes you need to
go punch through to the internet and go to the browser and do it right I mean this type of you know different domains exist in our lives in other in other places too we are working actively with the people we believe provide the apps the core apps the first maybe the top 10
and the perida of 80 20 it's even more stark when you start talking to people what are the most have apps while you are driving or why you are a passenger you're riding in our vehicles that this is actually far shorter than the long tail of things that we do and so
however there's definitely I think you you're you're touching up on an interesting area that I am also interested in which is is there a way to bring vehicle optimized versions of certain apps let's say if you're a surfer there's this great app called surf line I mean it will be actually
fascinating wouldn't it be if if you had a really vehicle optimized version of the surf line app that gave you information about what the tight conditions are wind etc etc but didn't a smart way and then now let's go a little bit into the future I believe this
rabbit holes of vertical micro segmented apps they are going to go on there a change too especially with voice interface becoming far more intuitive than ever before because of large language models I think large language models biggest change for me is finally I know I can be understood by the
machine despite the fact I did not phrase myself just perfectly and that device is going to be able to enter my intent and give me answers today the reason I think we all default to a more touch user interface is we as users have to do a lot of the disambiguation instead of the machine
understanding what you want you are going through things I'm pointing all you want to know actually is this you don't need an app all you want to go I'm driving to app toes California to surf in an hour tell me do surf conditions it's a two sentences answer do I really need to app for
that apples solution to this is next generation car play where they will send more information to more screens where they will help car makers design the instrument cluster and other screens your old boss jaws a big advocate of this it's been taken up a little bit but not a lot have you
looked at it would you use next gen car play for mapple I look at almost everything I draw almost every competitors car on their design and I I have old devices that you probably also carrying your pocket to learn and test and understand a we already kind of made our decision about
the experience we want to create which is going to be deeply worth the integrity experience that GM designs it for our customers builds it maintains it updates it innovates on that's our direction there's a really interesting a b test happening sort of an a b test in the market right now
you've got the blazer e v which has your approach there's the Honda Prologue which is substantially the same platform and the acro ZDX substantially the same e v platform they support car play the prologue is kind of a hit it's a I think a surprise hit for Honda are you keeping track
of that do you think that's attributable to car play is that difference in branding we look at the competition but we're probably a customer and quality obsessed company rather than competition competition obsessed company we're definitely highly competitive company but it goes back to something
we talked about didn't we it's about conviction we have high conviction that this is the right pat for us to take and to create a truly interior experience for our customers and like I said easy decision would be just why make that effort but we have strong conviction that effort pays off
in better customer experience you get to get most out of your vehicle because now we're are the company that builds the vehicle that's also creating the infotainment experience the cluster experience the app and everything we're going to build that one day and maybe a voice
assistant sent on top of it the only way you can create that and to add magic is if you have a strong conviction that you want to own all of these because without it it's hard to create those seamless experiences you've got to always feel the seams and I don't think you should be in the
business of feeling the seams by you by a 30 40 50 60 100 thousand dollar car that's that's our job to make it beautiful and seamless we have a lot of listeners just say look I'm not I'm just not going to buy a car without a car play and that's fine point them to something that will make
them change their mind they'll 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 need to wait for the future I think super cruise and how it integrates natively with you can get
super cruise on a lyric with car play today with Navy gate well the thing is though your experience when you are using a native integration to the map that knows what you're going to be what is the road conditions what's happening where is the construction sites and ties it back to the battery
system and says by the time you get your destination and return your battery is going to be at this level here is the energy efficient route you can take I cannot create that magical little dots connecting to each other if I had to go back and forth between a navigation app running
on another platform and back and forth and that's the thing that you don't need to wait for the future to create that and the other things that we want to create is similar things especially when we start introducing level three autonomy hands off eyes off and even to future of like the
robot taxis that tight integration is a prerequisite not optional feature yeah well bearice thank you so much command to coder you got to come back so we can do a full hour and robot taxis and a full hour on the different tree and product and program and all right nila I really enjoyed our
conversation great questions and I'm going to listen to this episode too it turns out pretty great we can all learn something maybe we'll get that blog post from google I'll let you know thank you bears thanks so much I'd like to thank bearish for taking the time to join to coder and thank you
for listening I hope you enjoyed it if you'd like to let us know what you thought about this episode or really anything else at all drop us a line you can email us at decoderatheverge.com we really do read all the emails even from the people who love carpool you can also hit me up directly on
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