Below is the text on Mary Barra’s comments on General Motor Co.’s (NYSE: GM) plans for an intelligent car:

Thank you for that warm welcome.

It’s a great pleasure to join you tonight.

I know the dialogue at this congress is going to be provocative. And what you experience behind the wheel on Belle Isle – if you even touch a steering wheel while you’re there – will be jaw-dropping.

Some of you know this already, but you have come to Detroit at a critical time in the city’s history. Long-vacant skyscrapers are being brought back to life, public and private partnerships are launching massive building projects and a bias for action is taking hold.

It’s inspiring… and I believe… transformative.

Waves of energy like this come in cycles. And they create windows of opportunity where vision and leadership are rewarded. It’s true in cities… and it’s true in industries like ours too.

If you recognize what’s going on… if you think big… if you ask your scientists and engineers to innovate… then you can change the world not in cautious steps…

but in great leaps.

I think the global auto industry is in the midst of one of these innovation cycles. And at GM, we have a renewed passion… the financial resources… the technology…

and the talent to think big… to step up our investments… and take calculated risks.

But where should we focus?

For my part, I’m listening to customers for insights. And whether you listen to people in Los Angeles… or London… or Beijing… what they want from the auto industry is clear.

They want unfettered personal mobility.

More specifically, they expect us to help mitigate… if not eliminate… the congestion… pollution… and traffic accidents that are the downsides of automobiles.

To me, these aren’t noble causes. They are imperatives. If we expect our industry to thrive well into the future, we have to provide solutions. To do that, we have to be passionate and fearless advocates for safety technologies like vehicle-to-vehicle communication… vehicle-to-infrastructure communication… and ultimately, fully autonomous driving.

No other suite of technologies offers so much potential for good… and it’s time to turn potential into reality. That’s why I’m announcing today that GM will put its first V2V-enabled car on the road in about two years.

What’s more, I’m announcing that we will bring an advanced, highly automated driving technology to the market in the same timeframe.

We are not doing anything for the sake of the technology itself. We’re doing it because it’s what customers around the world want – and not just GM owners. That’s why I am asking ask all of you to accelerate your work in the field as well.

If we make bold moves together… then our generation will stand on the shoulders of engineering giants like Charles Kettering… Henry Ford… Eiji (Eee-jee) Toyoda… and Karl Benz.

I know we can do it.

Where we are today is actually a milestone on a long journey.

In the video you just saw, you caught a glimpse of a concept car called the Firebird II. It was one of a series of GM concepts from the 1950s, like the LeSabre, that explored design themes and technologies that could advance the automotive state of the art.

It’s fascinating to look back and see how these concepts showcased innovations that are commonplace in today’s cars, including adaptive lighting, downsized and boosted engines, alternative fuels and lightweight materials.

Every detail was designed to impress. But then the studios had to stretch their imaginations. Think about it… the Boeing 707… the polio vaccine… the cathode ray tube… innovation was a daily part of life in the ’50s.

The Firebird II was a showcase for GM’s most innovative thinking about the hot transportation topic of the day: congestion.

Congestion was such a big issue that GM actually created a “Better Highways” essay contest in 1952 and offered a prize of $25,000 – that’s close to a quarter of a million dollars today – to the person who came up with the best solution “to plan and pay for the safe and adequate highways we need.”

The New Yorkers here should be able to guess who won. It was Robert Moses, who built 416 miles of parkways in the New York City area during his long career. His prescription was a $50 billion campaign to build his era’s equivalent of smart roads – a vast network of limited access freeways and interstates with uniform design, speed limits and lighting.

GM’s cross-country “Parade of Progress” tour showed how this would work. It featured a huge mobile display with more than 1,000 miniature buildings, 1,500 model cars and trucks and countless trees and other fixtures. One side showed a city choked by traffic congestion. Then revolving panels turned over to show how expressways and bypasses would make the problems go away.

The Firebird II took this solution several steps further. It cruised on superhighways with dedicated high-speed safety lanes. And finally, when conditions were right, the driver could engage a fully autonomous mode and let Mission Control pilot the vehicle.

Simply stated, the Firebird II was intelligent… and connected… even if some of its technology was considered science fiction.

Today, “intelligent and connected” is an engineering reality, and it’s exactly the right path for us to follow as we build the next generation of vehicles and roads around the world. So how should we move forward?

Let’s start with the concept of “intelligent” cars, because our first responsibility is to keep making vehicles smarter in order to reduce crashes and injuries. Then we can weave in connectivity, and all the opportunities that it opens up.

Everyone here will agree that cars are more intelligent than they used to be. During the last 10 years, we have leveraged short- and long-range radars, cameras and sensors to support an incredible range of features, including… adaptive cruise control, cross-traffic alerts and crash-imminent braking, which can stop a car even if the driver’s foot isn’t on the brake pedal.

However, despite these advances, crashes still occur far too frequently, the toll on society is unacceptable and it’s a global problem. The United Nations and the World Health Organization say that vehicle crashes cost countries anywhere between 1 percent to 3 percent of their gross national product every year, which is staggering.

But we can’t let numbers disguise the fact that we’re talking about individual people… and their families. That’s why doing something is a responsibility every GM brand embraces, from Opel and Chevrolet to Cadillac.

 

Almost 20 years ago, we introduced OnStar connected vehicle services and today our advisors respond to more than 13,000 emergency requests per month in North America alone. Now we’re growing aggressively in China and Mexico, and expanding into Europe next year.

We are also expanding the availability of technologies like adaptive forward lighting, rear vision cameras, blind-zone monitoring and lane-keeping… and we are adding more nameplates that offer adaptive cruise control and collision-imminent braking.

Many of these technologies provide the foundation for something we call “Super Cruise.” That’s the working name for the GM semi-automated driving technology that allows for hands-free driving on the highway – both at speed and in stop-and-go driving.

We started Super Cruise demonstration drives back in the spring of 2012. And since then, we’ve refined the system through thousands of hours on the road and in our Research Driving Simulator, which is the ultimate Xbox.

In 2013, Popular Mechanics magazine ranked Super Cruise among the year’s most important innovations in technology, medicine, space exploration and automotive design. They thought it might be in production as soon as 2018.

Well, we’re going to better that by about two years and launch Super Cruise in the same timeframe as V2V. And it will appear for the first time on an all-new Cadillac that’s going to enter a segment where we don’t compete today.

With Super Cruise, when there’s a congestion alert on roads like California’s Santa Monica Freeway, you can let the car take over and drive hands-free and feet-free through the worst stop and go traffic around. And if the mood strikes you on the high-speed road from Barstow, California to Las Vegas, you can take a break from the wheel and pedals and let the car do the work.

Having it done for you – that’s true luxury. But rest assured, Super Cruise will keep drivers alert and engaged, and when they want to take control, they’re going to find a car that’s really fun to drive.

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