How GM Bought Its Way to the Front of the Driverless-Car Pack

Three years ago, General Motors Co. wouldn’t even let its self-driving cars out of the parking lot. Its custom Chevrolet Volt hybrids, meant to autonomously ferry employees around GM’s 700-acre research and development campus in the Detroit suburb of Warren, Mich., could only handle basic driving and topped out at about 25 miles per hour.

At the time, Silicon Valley’s legions of programmers had a big lead on Detroit. Automakers were struggling to develop operating systems as intuitive as Apple Inc.’s and Google’s, and Google had already been working for years to bring artificial intelligence to cars, while Apple was working to spin up a similar project. If either company, or Elon Musk’s Tesla Inc., beat the likes of GM and Ford Motor Co. to reliable, mass-market driverless vehicles, the old-school carmakers would be doomed to become mere manufacturers such as Foxconn Technology Group—low-margin assembly lines that left the high-value design work to others.