GM CEO Mary Barra takes first autonomous car ride with Cruise: ‘It’s just surreal’

GM CEO Mary Barra takes first autonomous car ride with Cruise: ‘It’s just surreal’

"It's just surreal," CEO Mary Barra says while testing one of the company's driverless cars in San Francisco, calling it a highlight of her career. Barra took the ride last week in a retrofitted Chevrolet Bolt EV with Kyle Vogt, founder and interim CEO of Cruise, the automaker's majority-owned autonomous vehicle subsidiary. The self-driving vehicle, called Tostada, is one of a fleet of driverless Cruise vehicles currently operating at night in San Francisco as the company prepares this year. "That was incredible," Barra says in video posted on the Cruise's YouTube page. Later adding, "This is going to change the way people move in such a positive way … I'm over the moon." Vogt stepped in as CEO after Dan Ammann, a former GM executive who was leading Cruise, was over internal disagreements with Barra. Autonomous vehicles are viewed as a potential multitrillion dollar market. GM expects the operations to potentially contribute up to $50 billion in annualized revenue by the end of this decade. However, commercializing self-driving vehicles has been than many predicted even a few years ago. The ride was Barra's first in an unmanned vehicle without a safety driver. Cruise late last year began testing a fully