General Motors is on a mission to put self-driving tech in the hands of all its customers, starting with the Cadillac, and the automaker's autonomy boss says it has the talent to get there.
In an interview with Business Insider, GM's VP of autonomous vehicles, Rashed Haq, said the automaker is attracting engineers from top AV companies to develop self-driving technology for "millions" of GM customers.
It's a tall order, one Haq said no company has yet to meet. Tesla's Full Self-Driving requires constant human supervision, and Waymo's robotaxis operate within limited geographies using a costly suite of sensors.
"Nobody has solved millions of cars all across the US roads at, let's say, $10,000 worth of hardware," Haq said. "That is still a very much unsolved problem and a very interesting problem."
GM's near-term goal is eyes-off driving for the Cadillac Escalade IQ by 2028, starting with highway driving. Haq said the company will "expand from there."
The push is GM's latest attempt to regain momentum in the autonomous driving race. In 2024, GM shut down Cruise's robotaxi venture and folded the talent and resources back into its parent company to focus on self-driving in personal cars.
That shift has shaped GM's hiring strategy ever since.
GM made several key hires in 2025, including Haq, Ronalee Mann, a Cruise alum and ex-Aptiv executive, and Sterling Anderson, a former Tesla Autopilot leader who joined GM as chief product officer. Earlier this year, the automaker also brought on Sean Harris, who spent two years at Wayve as director of autonomy; Jean-Yves Bouguet, a principal software engineer at Zoox; and ZJ Jia, who spent a year at Uber before joining GM as a senior engineer. The latter three hires were also Cruise alums.
A GM spokesperson said that the company has been hiring from Cruise and its competitors as it continues to build out its "autonomous-driving bench."
"We've already nearly doubled last year's external hires, we're filling roles faster than we were in 2025, and applications from external AV talent have doubled too," the GM spokesperson said, though they declined to provide specific figures.
Haq declined to share the size of GM's autonomy organization, saying only that it's "appropriately sized" for what GM is trying to build. He confirmed that GM is hiring talent from competing AV companies, including Tesla, Waymo, and Zoox.
Part of GM's pitch to engineers is scale, Haq said. The automaker has a large customer base, its own manufacturing footprint, a growing autonomy team, and data from Super Cruise, its hands-free driver-assistance system. GM has said Super Cruise has logged more than 1 billion miles of hands-free driving.
Haq also pointed to GM's sensor strategy as a differentiator. Unlike Tesla, GM plans to use lidar for eyes-off driving, a sensor Haq said provides "material advantage."
The combination of scale and strategy gives GM an edge over robotaxi companies and smaller startups, the autonomy boss said. Engineers can work on a self-driving system meant for customer-owned cars that will surpass the scale of a commercial robotaxi fleet.
"We're talking about tens of millions of cars," Haq said.
The 2028 test
GM's hiring push comes as the automaker races against competitors to deliver eyes-off driving tech by 2028.
Ford is also targeting a 2028 launch date for a similar technology, while Rivian moved up the date, targeting 2027 for eyes-off driving.
Since announcing GM's new autonomy stack last year, Haq said the team has made rapid progress. The company ran the stack in simulation in January, then on a closed course in February, and on public roads in March.
Challenges remain. Haq said GM has to finish building and fully testing the driving system, including ensuring safety, handling edge cases, and providing a smooth customer experience.
The company is trying to draw lessons from both Super Cruise and Cruise, the failed robotaxi project. Anderson, GM's chief product officer, previously told Business Insider that GM's personal autonomy work could eventually lead to a robotaxi service, though the company's top priority is privately-owned vehicles.
For now, Haq said GM's bet is on the right mix of talent, data, sensors, and manufacturing scale to help solve autonomy on a scale that has eluded the AV industry.
"Data, talent, the right architecture, manufacturing scale," he said. "Hard to argue with that."
