General Motors Co. is one of many auto companies interested in the future of self-driving cars, and today the 109-year-old car maker announced that it plans to launch its own autonomous taxi service in 2019, going head to head with similar projects being developed by traditional rivals such as Ford Motor Co. and new competitors such as Alphabet Inc.’s Waymo and Uber Technologies Inc.

GM President Dan Ammann told investors during a call today that fleets of the company’s autonomous Chevy Bolt electric cars will be ready to deploy “in large scale, in the most complex environments, in 2019.” If GM pulls it off, this timetable would put its self-driving car initiative well ahead of Ford’s mass production goal, which is currently set for 2021.

Like Ford, GM was slow to share its self-driving car plans with the public, but the company has dramatically ramped up its efforts over the last two years. GM’s autonomous vehicle ambitions began in earnest in 2016 when it acquired self-driving car startup Cruise Automation Inc. for $1 billion. Rather than developing an entire new car, Cruise set out to apply its self-driving tech to a car already manufactured by GM. After evaluating several vehicles, Cruise eventually settled on the Chevy Bolt.

After testing its first self-driving cars in private, GM eventually began testing on public roads in Michigan at the end of last year. Just two months later, rumors surfaced that GM would be partnering with ride hailing service Lyft Inc. to test thousands of self-driving vehicles in 2018, and in October GM announced that it had acquired LiDAR startup Strobe for an undisclosed amount.

GM announced in September that it was already preparing to mass-produce a line of self-driving cars, and the following month the company revealed that it would be expanding its public road testing to include Manhattan.

During today’s call with investors, GM’s executives made it clear that the company not only sees self-driving cars as an important new market, but it also believes that the technology has the potential to be more profitable than its current production.

GM Chief Financial Officer Chuck Stevens said during the call that the newly announced taxi service could be “potentially bigger than our current core business, with better margins.” Stevens added that the project could “take 40 percent of the cost out of ride services.”

Photo: GM