One of Elon Musk’s old enemies joins the race to run GM

. The company ditched plans last year for its Cruise robotaxi program after spending $10 billion and a decade on its development. It has suffered setbacks around its EV and autonomous-driving strategies.

The company in October booked a $1.6 billion charge on its EV business as demand for the vehicles sinks.A parade of executives plucked from Apple, Google and Tesla have come and gone in quick succession, while GM lags behind Waymo and Chinese players such as Baidu and WeRide in developing a system that allows drivers to take their eyes off the road.“The way things are going, you just want someone from Silicon Valley to stick around for more than six to nine months,” said Morningstar analyst David Whiston, who has covered the automotive industry since 2007.Since Anderson joined, a trio of high-ranking tech executives have left GM. One of them, the company’s software-engineering chief, left a week after appearing on stage alongside Anderson and Barra to roll out a new tech strategy.“Our strategy is bigger than any one leader, and it’s working,” the GM spokeswoman said.The new tech strategy, helmed by Anderson, aims to bring eyes-off driving to the market in 2028 in an electric Cadillac SUV.

It also includes making a lower-cost battery and introducing artificial-intelligence into GM vehicles like the Chevy Silverado.A soft-spoken technophile with a doctorate in robotics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Anderson has a collection of patents and papers on autonomous technology. Asked recently to outline GM’s tech strategy, he described a vision of future electric vehicles with “much higher computational ceiling or headroom.”He went on to clarify: “What effectively that means for you practically in your life is