General Motors announced the appointment of Sterling Anderson, co-founder and chief product officer of autonomous trucking company Aurora, as executive VP, global product, and chief product officer.
Reporting to GM President Mark Reuss, Anderson will oversee the end-to-end product lifecycle for both gas- and electric-powered vehicles, including hardware, software, services, and user experience. Anderson, who joins GM on June 2, will be based in GM’s Mountain View Tech Center in California.
“Our customers are expecting more from our vehicles than ever before,” Reuss said. “We have an opportunity to evolve the way we build from the ground up, with tighter integration between software and hardware, shorter development cycles, and an unwavering focus on a seamless customer experience. Sterling brings decades of leadership in automotive engineering and transformative software innovation to his new role and is the right leader to help GM continue leading now and into the future.”
“Sterling joins GM at a critical time as our industry continues to reinvent itself,” GM Chair and CEO Mary Barra said. “He brings decades of leadership in automotive engineering, tech start-ups, and software innovation. Sterling will help accelerate the pace of progress – he shares our passion and vision for beautifully designed, high-performing, and technology-forward vehicles.”
Aurora recently launched America’s first commercial, fully driverless trucking service in Texas, running regularly between Houston and Dallas. Before co-founding Aurora in 2017, Anderson worked at Tesla, where he led both the Model X program and the team that delivered Tesla Autopilot.
Anderson holds a master’s and Ph.D. degree in robotics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He developed MIT’s Intelligent Co-Pilot, a semi-autonomous vehicle safety system, which helped lay the foundation for major progress in how humans and machines can work together more effectively.
“GM has a deep heritage, bold vision, and the technical foundation to create products that millions of people love,” Anderson said. “The world is at an inflection point. Advances in foundational technologies have opened opportunities to revolutionize not just how we create products, but what those products can be and do. I look forward to partnering with the talented team at GM to build on the transformation they’ve already begun.”
