General Motors has noodled with the idea of automated vehicles since at least the mid-1950s, when the company produced a film with its Firebird II concept car that showed a family cruising down a highway autonomously. Now, more than six decades later, GM claims to be getting close to making its first highly automated vehicles a commercial reality.
Although it has shown glimpses of three generations of automated Chevrolet Bolt prototypes over the past 18 months, GM has remained remarkably mum about the technical details. On Monday, the automaker and its Cruise Automation subsidiary finally shared more about its current-generation program and allowed a small group of reporters to go for rides near its San Francisco headquarters.
As in Waymo?s automated Chrysler Pacificas, GM has equipped each seat with a tablet that provides a display of what the sensors are seeing, the paths the car is considering, and the currently chosen path. All of this is meant to help build trust by assuring riders that the car is ?seeing? everything moving around the car. The Cruise team built and has spent several months testing a smartphone app to request rides in the fashion of ride-hailing services Uber and Lyft. We were allowed to choose from several destinations to go for about a 20-minute ride in the Bolt EV, a vehicle positioned as a flagship for the company?s future-minded urban-mobility efforts.

Sitting in the back seat, I scanned back and forth between the screen in front of me and the...