General Motors shares climbed Monday after Deutsche Bank said a meeting with the automaker’s management “confirmed” expectations GM could launch self-driving vehicles “well ahead of competitors.”

Shares rose more than 4 percent in morning trading.

“GM confirmed that their [autonomous vehicles] are on track for a critical milestone… they will be safely driving passengers in complex urban environments without a human backup driver within the next few quarters, well ahead of competitors,” research analyst Rod Lache and a team of other analysts said in a Sunday report. “GM agreed with our suggestion that large scale commercial operations would start relatively soon (we expect this in 2020).”

The conversations with GM management also indicated the company plans to launch its own transportation service to compete with Lyft and Uber, Lache said. “GM does not intend to sell the technology to unaffiliated third parties; and GM appears to have thought through many details of how the [Transportation as a Service] will operate,” he said.

GM did not immediately respond to a CNBC request for comment.

Lache also expects GM’s autonomous vehicle operations will first launch in the “most lucrative markets” of densely populated cities at a cost of less than $1 per mile.

Last Sunday, Sept. 24, Lache upgraded GM’s shares to buy from hold and said that he expects “GM’s [autonomous vehicles] will be ready for commercial deployment, without human drivers, much sooner than widely expected (within quarters, not years); that businesses built off of this platform will ramp much faster than is widely expected; and that this will be material, even to a company of GM’s size.”

“Our takeaway from this meeting [with GM management] was that our key conclusions were spot on,” Lache said in his latest report.

GM shares have climbed more than 7 percent from the close on Friday, Sept. 22, through Monday morning trading. The stock is up 21 percent for the year.

Shares of electric car maker Tesla, which many see as leading the future of automobile development, fell half a percent Monday. The stock is up nearly 59 percent this year.

As of Friday’s close, GM had a market capitalization of about $61.5 billion, recovering its lead on Tesla’s market cap of $56.5 billion after falling below Elon Musk’s company in April.

— CNBC’s Tae Kim contributed to this report.

Source: Investment Cnbc
GM jumps 4% after Deutsche Bank says automaker to launch self-driving car fleet as soon as 2020