Asian Tech Press (SEP 14) -- GM's venture capital arm has invested millions of dollars in Oculii, a U.S.-based self-driving car radar sensor software startup, said Steven Hong, co-founder of the company.

Steven said GM could use Oculii's low-cost software to improve radar resolution and help scale up its assisted-driving and self-driving cars.

The radar system in self-driving cars controls the car's forward motion while measuring the distance between objects, enabling the vehicle to calculate and decide whether to slow down or accelerate accordingly to avoid an accident or crash.

However, Tesla Inc announced the elimination of radar sensors in its production models in favor of a "pure vision" solution powered by cameras and artificial intelligence, raising questions again about the safety and performance of its assisted driving system.

In an interview with Reuters, Hong said he agreed with Tesla artificial intelligence director Andrej Karpathy's comment about the shortcomings of traditional radars. Karpathy said in June that radars sometimes make "dumb" measurements of the environment, holding back its vision system. "Traditional radar is very low resolution and very noisy," Hong said. But high-resolution radars are a key backup to cameras and other sensors when they fail, thus providing "extra safety," he added.