United States. The Aurora co-founder and former leader of Tesla's Model X program joins GM to spearhead its global product strategy.
General Motors (GM) announced the addition of Sterling Anderson as Executive Vice President of Global Product and Chief Product Officer. Anderson, co-founder and chief product officer of Aurora , a startup focused on autonomous trucks, will take office on June 2 and will work from GM's Technology Center in Mountain View, California.
With an extensive background in technological innovation and autonomous mobility, Anderson will report directly to Mark Reuss, GM's president, and will be responsible for overseeing the full lifecycle of internal combustion and electric vehicles. He will also lead initiatives related to hardware, software, services and user experience.
"Today more than ever, our customers expect more from our vehicles," said Reuss. "We have the opportunity to evolve the way we produce them 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 automotive engineering leadership and application innovation to his new role, and he is the right leader to help GM remain leaders today, and in the future."
Prior to founding Aurora in 2017 — which recently launched the first fully autonomous commercial truck service in the U.S., operating between Houston and Dallas — Anderson worked at Tesla, where he led the Model X program and Autopilot development.
An engineer by training, he holds a Master's and PhD in robotics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he developed the Intelligent Co-Pilot, a safety system for semi-autonomous vehicles that laid the foundation for advanced collaboration between humans and machines.
"GM has a great heritage, an agile vision and a technical foundation to create products that millions of people love," Anderson said. "The world is at a turning point. Advances in fundamental technologies have opened up opportunities to revolutionize not only how we create products, but also what those products can be and do. I look forward to collaborating with the talented team at GM to drive the transformation they have already begun."
