An employee looks on next to an assembly production line of Buick cars at a General Motors factory in Wuhan, Hubei Province, Jan. 28, 2015. (Photo : REUTERS)
Old futuristic movies have the action star press his watch and a car comes out of it. General Motors is testing an app that is quiet close to that, although it would not produce a car but lock and unlock a vehicle remotely.
Themarketbusiness.com reports that the car-manufacturing giant is set to deploy an Apple Watch app, making the timepiece by the Cupertino-based tech giant go beyond its health monitoring functions. In an analyst presentation, GM Vice President of Strategy Mike Ableson confirmed that the firms in testing the app.
That feature of future GM vehicles would make it more competitive against Apple's electric vehicle and Google's self-driving cars.
Another GM initiative that Ableson shared during the presentation is offering shared Chevrolet SUVs to residents of The Ritz Plaza luxury apartment in Times Square, New York. GM would also launch the Chevrolet Volt, powered by a battery that runs for 50 miles before it transitions to gasoline engine.
The first area where GM will roll out in 2016 the self-driving Volt is its engineering campus in Southeast Michigan. To reserve a unit, GM workers would use an app. The $40,000 fully electric Volt is set to roll out by 2016, reports Pulseheadlines.
GM also collaborated with Hondo Motor to come out with a fuel-cell vehicle set for sale by 2020. The company is also working on an "eBike" concept.
The innovations, according to GM CEO Mary Barra, are part of the company's redefinition of customer choices and the future of mobility. "The convergence of rapidly improving technology and changing consumer preference is creating an inflection point for the transportation industry not seen in decades," USA Today quotes Barra.
