Honda, GM: autonomous partners

Auto industry giants helping Cruise develop self-driving vehicle.

Self-driving car company Cruise Automation is rushing to create a new autonomous vehicle with the help of one of the largest names in the automotive industry.

Honda said it will invest $2.75 billion into Cruise’s autonomous vehicle operations over the next 12 years, an infusion that arrives several months after the Japanese firm SoftBank announced a $2.25 billion investment in the company.

Both investments bring the four-year-old company’s valuation to a whopping $14.6 billion, General Motors said in a news release Wednesday. Cruise Automation — which is already building a fleet of autonomous vehicles that could hit American streets as early as next year — is a subsidiary of GM.

The Detroit automaker’s stock was up over 2 percent Wednesday.

Company officials were short on specific details about the new vehicle, but in a statement published on Medium, Kyle Vogt, the chief executive of Cruise, said Honda will work jointly with Cruise and GM to develop an “innovative, space-efficient autonomous vehicle” that “minimizes congestion on crowded city streets.”

In an interview Wednesday morning on Cheddar Live, Vogt said Honda brings experience in “space efficient design” and called the massive Japanese automaker the perfect partner for creating a vehicle that eases congestion on city streets. He declined to offer a timeline for the new vehicle’s release and said his company is “moving as quickly as we possibly can.”

GM noted that the vehicle will be manufactured at high volume “for global deployment.”

“Shouldn’t the car of the future have giant TV screens, a mini bar, and lay-flat seats?” Vogt statement says. “Maybe it should. We’ve been quietly prototyping a groundbreaking new vehicle over the past two years that is fully released from the constraints of having a driver behind the wheel.”

“Building a new vehicle that has an incredible user experience, optimal operational parameters, and efficient use of space is the ultimate engineering challenge,” the statement adds.

The funding arrives nearly 10 months after GM unveiled the Cruise AV — a fourth-generation autonomous vehicle based on a Chevy Bolt EV that lacks a steering wheel, pedals and manual controls that have come to define the experience of riding inside an automobile for more than a century.