Honda invests US$2.75 billion in GM’s self-driving Cruise division
General Motors’ self-driving car unit drew its second major investment in a matter of months, with Honda committing to spending $2.75 billion on backing the company and joining forces to bring autonomous vehicles to market.
Honda will make a $750 million equity investment in GM Cruise, plus spend $2 billion over 12 years on jointly developing and deploying autonomous vehicles, according to a news release.
The deal follows a $2.25-billion investment in Cruise by SoftBank Vision Fund in May.
The investment will hand Honda a 5.7 per cent stake in Cruise, which has positioned GM as one of the front-runners in the packed race to bring self-driving vehicles to market.
The U.S. automaker is a serious contender, along with Way mo, Alphabet Inc.’s Google autonomous vehicle unit.
The deal with GM and Cruise is exclusive, Honda chief operations officer Seiji Kuraishi said on a conference call with reporters. That raises questions about what happened to Honda’s plans to work with Waymo.
While the two companies announced talks in late 2016, details of what they would do together have been sparse.
Kuraishi wouldn’t discuss during the call what happened to negotiations between Honda and Waymo.
The new partnership has the potential to boost the global scale of GM’s self-driving car technology and accelerate deployment of autonomous vehicles for Honda. The two automakers will develop a self-driving model that can be used in a variety of ways and will be deployed in a Cruise autonomous network.