One of the largest car manufacturers in the world, Honda, is teaming up with Cruise Automation on self-driving cars. Cruise Automation is the self-driving subsidiary of General Motors. The two companies will collaborate on a purpose-built self-driving car that can be useful in many different scenarios and will be easy to produce at scale for a global release. Honda is contributing $2.75 billion for this project.
Honda is making a $2.75 billion investment in this project. The $2 billion will be spread over 12 years while the remaining 750 million is an equity investment in Cruise Automation. This brings Honda’s total financial commitment to $2.75 billion.
Cruise Automation can certainly chalk this up as a major win merely a year or so after it received a $2.25 billion investment from the SoftBank Vision Fund in May 2017. With Honda’s commitment, GM’s self-driving unit now has a post-money valuation of $14.6 billion.
General Motors had actually acquired Cruise in 2016 for $1 billion in order to speed up its work on self-driving cars. The company is committed to deploying its fully driverless cars that don’t even have pedals or steering wheels for use in a commercial ride-hailing service by next year.
“Shouldn’t the car of the future have giant TV screens, a mini bar, and lay-flat seats? Maybe it should. We’ve been quietly prototyping a ground-breaking new vehicle over the past two years that is fully released from the constraints of having a driver behind the wheel,” said Cruise Automation CEO Kyle Vogt, without going into too many details about what this vehicle created in partnership with Honda might look like.
Filed in . Read more about Honda and Self-Driving Cars. Source: medium