[NY톡톡] Why can GM be spotlighted as the’automobile industry Apple’?

‘Automotive industry Apple’ only needs Tesla (TSLA). What bullshit is General Motors (GM) can pay attention to?

Saying that GM can be like Apple doesn’t sound like crazy, considering Tesla’s position in the electric car market. However, the massive change in automakers may not have even started a solid competition yet.

US investment media Motley Poole published an article on the 2nd (local time) entitled “Bold Prediction: GM is the Next Generation of Apple Stocks for Investors,” and argues that although not right now, GM has enough potential.

Motley Full said that if you look at the watch a little bit into the future, Tesla doesn’t necessarily mean that it will be the “automobile Apple”.

Today, tens of millions of vehicles are sold each year in the U.S. and around the world, spending about 95% of the time idle. Consumers spend hundreds or thousands of dollars a month on car maintenance, which has become a daily routine.

However, Uber (UBER) and Lyft (LYFT) have completely changed traffic and mobility accidents by making it easier to ride someone else’s vehicle. It’s more effective than owning a vehicle because you can use your own vehicle for a few dollars when you need it.

Autonomous taxis are no different from Uber or Rift’s services, and GM was the first in this regard.

GM is the major shareholder of Cruise, a startup capable of operating fully autonomous vehicles in California. Cruise has been testing 180 self-driving cars in San Francisco with’safety personnel’ on board, and this time, five of them have been granted permission to operate without people in the driver’s seat.

Motley Full said this cruise is the key to the GM future. So far, GM has been funding the cruise, but it doesn’t interfere much and has kept it separate rather than integrating. This is to keep Cruise working like a startup rather than being bound by the bureaucracy of big companies like GM.

GM’s role in Cruise’s future is to connect business units to Cruise’s business model. The cruise autonomous vehicle was designed with GM and plans to build the vehicle at the GM plant. In that sense, GM is Cruise’s contract manufacturer.

We know that over the past 20 years, at the heart of Apple’s success story, it has been constantly “self-destructing” to build a wider ecosystem.

In this respect, the representative one is the iPhone. Apple has been imagining and realizing a world with computers in every home, computers in everyone’s pocket, moving faster, smaller, and more.

Motley Full argues that GM should be replaced with a transport model that, through imagination like Apple, allows people to go wherever they want to go wherever they want, at an affordable price.

Cruise is the one that can make this possible. Rather than clinging to making cars or trucks, GM could build larger, more profitable businesses in the long run by shifting to a transport as a service model.

When people start paying transportation by miles instead of buying a vehicle, it creates enormous opportunities for companies like cruises. This is a business with hard-to-quantify potential, but assuming that the cruise charges $1 per mile traveled and can account for 5% of all vehicle miles driven in the United States in the next 10 to 20 years, 3 trillion annually before the COVID-19 pandemic. When traveling 300 billion miles, it is worth $165 billion in annual sales.

Motley Poole stresses that Cruise could get in the way of GM right now, but it could potentially build bigger businesses and, if used well, could be the next generation of Apple.

Taejun Lee, Global Economic Reporter [email protected]