GM hires Tesla’s former head of Autopilot and Aurora co-founder

GM announced that it has hired Sterling Anderson, who is known for being the early head of Tesla Autopilot and co-founder of self-driving startup Aurora.

Anderson joined Tesla in 2014 to lead the Model X program, but he is better known for being the early leader of the Autopilot program at Tesla from 2015 to 2016.

He left the automaker to co-found Aurora, a self-driving startup, with Chris Urmson, a founding member of Google’s self-driving project, which became Waymo.

In recent years, Aurora has been focused on bringing self-driving technology to trucks.

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Today GM announced that Anderson will joined the company in a new role of “Chief Product Officer” starting on June 2.

GM wrote about the role in an email:

In this newly created role, Sterling will oversee GM’s end-to-end product lifecycle, ensuring a cohesive strategy that integrates hardware, software, and services to deliver exceptional quality, performance, and user experiences across our global portfolio of gas-powered and electric vehicles.  

In his new role, Sterling will have several direct reports, including another former Tesla exec, Kurt Kelty, who now leads GM’s Battery, Propulsion and Sustainability team. He will also oversee Global Manufacturing & Product Engineering, Research & Development (led by Josh Tavel), Software and Services Product (led by Bariş Cetinok), and Vehicle Product Programs, Product Safety, Integration & Motorsports (led by Ken Morris).

GM president Mark Reuss: 

“With decades of leadership in automotive engineering, tech start-ups, and software innovation, Sterling is absolutely the right person to help us accelerate the pace of progress across the entire portfolio and to build vehicles with the design, performance, and technology that our customers want and expect.”

Anderson has an extensive educational background in robotics and expertise in motion planning and autonomous controls, which could indicate the direction GM is taking for its products.

Electrek’s Take

Former Tesla execs are now holding prominent roles on the product side of several major US automakers.

Doug Field leads Ford’s electric vehicle division, and Anderson has the top product role at GM.

What I like about this is that many of Tesla’s early employees, like Field and Anderson, were true believers of Tesla’s mission to accelerate the advent of electric transport.

Now they get to push this agenda in legacy automakers, which can have a great impact on that mission.

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