Honda Invests $2.75 Billion In GM’s Cruise For Self-Driving Cars

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.

Adnan Farooqui
Categories: Transportation
Tags: honda, Self-Driving Cars