General Motors Company (GM) Seeking to Become More Silicon Valley

General Motors Company (NYSE:GM) is in the spotlight after the company announced that it will add ~1,100 new jobs and invest $14 million in a new R&D facility for Cruise Automation in San Francisco. The investments will hopefully accelerate GM’s self-driving technology efforts and give the company a step-up versus Silicon Valley competitors. General Motors Company (NYSE:GM) and Cruise Automation is currently testing more than 50 Chevy Bolt EVs with self-driving tech in the United States.

GM CEO Mary Barra said, ‘Expanding our team at Cruise Automation and linking them with our global engineering talent is another important step in our work to redefine the future of personal mobility. Self-driving technology holds enormous benefits to society in the form of increased safety and access to transportation. Running our autonomous vehicle program as a start-up is giving us the speed we need to continue to stay at the forefront of development of these technologies and the market applications’.

With GM’s efforts at self-driving, the company could potentially have the world’s largest self-driving car fleet in the near future. According the IEEE Spectrum, GM could have as many as 300 autonomous Chevy Bolts in test mode, up from the present ~50. Alphabet’s Waymo currently has the largest test fleet at around 80 vehicles.

What Does The Smart Money Sentiment Say?

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The smart money was bullish on General Motors in the fourth quarter. According to our data, 65 top funds (of the 742 we track) were long GM at the end of December, up from 62 at the end of September. The amount held by those funds also increased to $4.67 billion, from $3.53 billion in the same time periods. Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway owned 50 million shares at the end of 2016.

The Bottom Line
To maintain its place in the future, General Motors Company (NYSE:GM) is investing heavily into self-driving driving tech. For more reading, check out ‘10 Most Expensive Armoured Cars In the World‘.

Disclosure:None

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