From The Drive · Joel Feder · · 1m
GM's Future Silverados Need Fewer Dealership Visits
GM's new central computer system could cut Silverado dealership visits by 40x.
In brief
GM's new central computer system could cut Silverado dealership visits by 40x. General Motors plans to reduce Silverado dealership visits through over-the-air software updates using a central compute system. Originally reported by The Drive.
GM's New Central Compute System
General Motors plans to reduce Silverado dealership visits through over-the-air software updates using a central compute system.
“The goal is to significantly reduce what would need a dealership visit versus what can be done OTA.”
Central Compute System Benefits
The system will have 40 times more compute power than today’s architecture and reduce dealership visits.
“Candidly, when you’re doing a central compute and when you’re doing a central compute that can flow across the entire portfolio, whether it’s gas or whether it’s electric, and so you have common software, and this gets back to the value of commonization where brand specificity isn’t necessary, when you can be common across this software that’s in a central compute, it should significantly reduce the amount of times that you would have to go to a dealership anyway because you’re engineering it one time and you’re validating it one time, and you’re using it more broad-based.”
Common Software Across Vehicles
GM’s central compute system will use common software across gas and electric vehicles to reduce dealership visits.
“Candidly, when you’re doing a central compute and when you’re doing a central compute that can flow across the entire portfolio, whether it’s gas or whether it’s electric, and so you have common software, and this gets back to the value of commonization where brand specificity isn’t necessary, when you can be common across this software that’s in a central compute, it should significantly reduce the amount of times that you would have to go to a dealership anyway because you’re engineering it one time and you’re validating it one time, and you’re using it more broad-based.”
Over-the-Air Updates
GM currently offers over-the-air updates but the new system will expand capabilities significantly.
“Just to be clear, this wouldn’t be brand new for GM. We have that today. I’m in a gas-powered truck today, I’m in one of our brand new light duties, and I got an over-the-air update just a couple days ago, 15 minutes, I said, ‘Yep, go ahead and accept,’ and got in and the software had been updated.”
Central Compute vs. Zonal Architecture
The central compute system reduces latency and fragmentation compared to Rivian’s zonal architecture.
“There is still the opportunity for fragmentation and latency when you’ve got zonal compute as opposed to a single central compute. Pros and cons with a central compute as well, it’s quite large, and so you have to package it, but you eliminate some things like latency and fragmentation when you’re central.”
Future Vehicle Benefits
The new system will allow vehicles to grow with consumers and have faster connectivity and feature updates.
“We’re bringing the software in-house when we do this. And so we’ve got our engineering team, our software engineering team writing all of the code and making sure that everything is speaking to each other, it is available for OTA. It’s quite a large undertaking, but it allows us to move with faster speed, the connectivity is going to be faster, the headroom for growth of features is going to be significantly greater than what we have today, we’re going to want the vehicle to be able to grow with the consumer in a way that right now today we can tap out pretty quickly to that headroom.”
The headline
General Motors plans to reduce Silverado dealership visits through over-the-air software updates using a central compute system.
