Silicon Valley Talent Packs Bags for Detroit

TRAVERSE CITY, MI – After years of playing second fiddle to Silicon Valley, the automobile industry is emerging as a destination for upstart talent on the back of vehicles crammed with software and next-generation computing technology.

“It is absolutely true,” says James Kuffner, chief technology officer-Toyota Research Institute, a robotics expert who jumped to the Japanese automaker from Google.

Kuffner says his Silicon Valley colleagues increasingly are pursuing positions at automakers once considered dinosaurs of industry, because manufacturers no longer recognize the car as a mechanically driven object but as a software platform ripe for development.

“Like your phone no longer just makes calls, the automobile performs all kinds of connected tasks,” Kuffner tells WardsAuto on the sidelines of the CAR Management Briefing Seminars here. “It is bringing people into this industry.”

Specific trends drawing the attention of top tech talent include Big Data, cloud computing and machine learning, he says. Automakers are using all three to elevate the driving experience, increase safety and diversify into on-demand mobility services such as ride sharing and ride hailing.

Kuffner, who is known in the computing world as the co-inventor of an algorithm considered the benchmark for robot-motion planning, says the promise of unlocking the massive databanks of automakers such as Toyota is attractive to technology developers hoping to make their mark.

“There are technical issues, there are social issues, there are safety issues – all of that has to be addressed,” he says.

Julie Steyn, vice president-Urban Mobility Programs at General Motors, has noticed the same dynamic. An industry outsider like Kuffner, Steyn is tasked with mashing together longtime GM employees with recruits from Silicon Valley for the automaker’s Maven startup.

Maven serves as the core of GM’s on-demand mobility services that include ride sharing and ride hailing (through its connection to Lyft and various peer-to-peer programs in Europe), plus autonomous-driving experiments on GM campuses worldwide.

Steyn says Maven has been lucky in attracting “a very interesting team,” citing hires from Google, Starbucks and the former San Francisco-based Sidecar on-demand car service. “It is a young group of people made in Detroit and hungry to conquer the world.”

Steyn, who joined GM in 2012 to lead its partnership, merger and acquisition activities, admits she had reservations about whether the automaker could pull off a startup such as Maven.

“It could not be further from the truth,” she tells the MBS crowd. “We got all the expertise of GM and used it in a different way.”

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