For decades, automakers enjoyed a luxury that had nothing to do with the softest leather or the smoothest engines. Their luxury was time, with some popular cars and trucks enduring for a decade or longer before they received a full redesign. The clock is ticking faster now, thanks to China. BYD and other automakers there are speeding EVs and other models from drawing board to showrooms in two years or less. General Motors is among the Western automakers striving to match that blistering pace, by harnessing AI and simulation to dramatically shorten development times. GM’s effort is being spearheaded by Sterling Anderson, the technologist and robotics guru who led development teams for Tesla’s Autopilot and the Model X before cofounding Aurora Innovation, the autonomous trucking company. GM lured Anderson last June as its chief product officer, offering a $40 million package to guide the development of the automaker’s cars, autonomous models, batteries, software, and other tech. How GM Is Accelerating Its Designs In a recent video call, Anderson and Jason Fischer, GM’s executive director of virtual integration engineering, walked me through the company’s latest design processes. But first, Anderson offered a wide-lens view of how AI is transforming everything that came before. Sterling Anderson, robotics guru and former Tesla executive, is pushing AI to accelerate GM’s design process.General Motors Anderson sees design and human ingenuity falling into three main epochs, beginning with thousands of years of empirical design that saw creators largely mimicking nature, building and testing models and advancing from there—slowly, expensively, and narrowly focused. “Flight is a great example,” Anderson says. “Humans looked to birds and said, ‘Hey, those wings seem to work pretty well. Let’s come up with something like it.’” The advent of virtual tools such as CAD and computational fluid dynamics in the 1950s kicked