Honda to invest US$2.7b in GM’s self-driving car unit

WARREN: Honda Motor Co Ltd will invest US$2.75 billion (RM11.4 billion) and take a 5.7% stake in General Motors Co’s Cruise selfdriving vehicle unit, to jointly develop autonomous vehicles for deployment in ride services fleets around the world.

This comes months after Japan’s SoftBank Group made a multibillion-dollar commitment to Cruise. That puts Cruise in a league with Alphabet Inc’s Waymo unit in terms of resources and aggressive plans to launch commercial services.

Honda has also been in talks with Waymo about a possible collaboration for two years. While no deal has been announced, an agreement between the two to discuss integrating Waymo’s selfdriving technology into Honda vehicles still stands, a spokesman for the automaker told Reuters.

Honda, which has lagged many of its rivals in developing selfdriving vehicles, is paying US$750 million upfront for the equity stake in GM’s Cruise and will contribute another US$2 billion over 12 years in development work and fees, the companies said on Wednesday.

The deal calls for Honda to provide engineering expertise, and extends cooperation between the pair in a technology that has enormous costs and risk but no market-ready products.

Other global automakers are forging similar alliances to share the uncertainty and huge price of developing technologies that have yet to gain widespread consumer acceptance.

Japanese automaker Toyota Motor Corp and SoftBank said yesterday they were teaming up to develop car services that rely on self-driving technology. – Reuters