Ammann Headlines 2018 Vehicle Finance Conference
Dan Ammann, President of General Motors, outlined GM’s bold vision for the future in the Keynote Speech Wednesday at the annual American Financial Services Association’s Vehicle Finance Conference & Expo.
We’ve been dreaming of the future for a long time and with developments like hands-free driving, change is here now,” Ammann declared. “We will see more change in the next five years than we’ve seen in the last 50.”
He said the rapid pace of change is creating tension between the “incumbents” like GM who have been in the auto industry for 100 years and the “interlopers” or disrupters who are dissecting industry business models. The incumbents have everything to lose vs. the disrupters who have nothing to lose.
“We are at the early stages of transformation,” he said. “Today, less than 1% of all vehicles sold are electric and less than 1% of all vehicle miles traveled were ride-share miles.”
He noted that the combined market capitalization of GM, Ford and FCA (Fiat-Chrysler) is $120 billion, the exact same amount of the combined market cap of Tesla, Uber and Lyft.
“We believe in an all-electric future,” he said. “We are bringing 20 new electric vehicles to market in the next five years.”
He said GM shipped 5,000 units of its electric Bolt to Korea and they sold out online in less than three hours. He also said GM was making strides in bringing an autonomous vehicle to market, but that safety was the number one priority of that plan, followed by scalability, navigating complex urban environments and engineering capability keeping pace with the rate of change.
March 21st, 2018
