Honda on road to robot cars with Cruise
Honda is joining forces with General Motors and Cruise, the San Francisco self-driving startup backed by GM, in the race to get robot cars on the road.
The Japanese carmaker has invested $750 million for a 5.7 percent stake in Cruise and is committing another $2 billion over 12 years to develop selfdriving cars, the companies said early Wednesday. It will contribute its engineering expertise to developing a selfdriving car that will be “manufactured at high volume for global deployment,” and a ride-hailing service, they said.
“This is a big deal,” Cruise CEO and co-founder Kyle Vogt said in an interview. “Honda, one of the biggest (carmakers) in the world, is coming together with Cruise and GM to advance their vision of autonomous vehicles in the future and help us to achieve ours.”
Honda’s experience with space-efficient design will be particularly important, he said.
GM has committed to having a robot taxi service operating in 2019 in a yet-to-be-disclosed location. Many observers think that San Francisco, where Cruise already tests more than 180 autonomous Chevy Bolts and gives ride-hailed transport
to its employees, is the logical location.
That ride-hailing service will use cars based on existing vehicles, Vogt said, but eventually Cruise will entirely redesign vehicles once they no longer need a driver, steering wheel, or gas and brake pedals.
Vogt offered tantalizing hints at some concepts in a blog post.
“Shouldn’t the car of the future have giant TV screens, a mini bar, and lay-flat seats?” he wrote. “Maybe it should. We’ve been quietly prototyping a ground-breaking new vehicle over the past two years.”
He declined to comment on a projected date for such a vehicle, other than pointing to his blog comments that it typically takes four years and a billion dollars to design and bring to market a new vehicle.
“We’ll try to reduce that timeline as much as possible,” he said. “I wake up every day trying to figure out we can do this faster. I fundamentally believe that selfdriving technology will make roads safer and transportation cleaner.”
Japan’s SoftBank Group invested $2.25 billion for a 19.6 percent stake in Cruise in May. After accounting for the Honda investment, Cruise said its valuation is now $14.6 billion — about a third of GM’s $48 billion market value.
GM bought Cruise two and a half years ago for a price between $500 million and $1 billion. It had 38 employees at the time. It now has 950 in its South of Market offices.