Honda to pour $2.75 billion into GM’s self-driving car unit

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

This comes months after Japan’s SoftBank Group Corp 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 self-driving technology into Honda vehicles still stands,’’ a spokeswoman for the automaker told Reuters.

Honda, which has lagged many of its rivals in developing self-driving vehicles, “is paying $750 million upfront for the equity stake in GM’s Cruise and will contribute another $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 marketready products.

In a blog post early on Wednesday, Cruise chief executive and co-founder Kyle Vogt joked: “Honda is joining the party. They’re bringing chips, dip, and $2.75 billion.”

Vogt told Reuters that Cruise and Honda would design a vehicle intended to be autonomous rather than the modified sedan with a steering wheel and driver controls that it is working on.

“We’re still shooting for 2019 to have the first version or first wave of vehicles that come out on our own platform. This is what comes after that,” he said.

Honda’s investment boosts the value of Cruise to $14.6 billion, about a third of GM’s $48 billion market cap. GM acquired the San Francisco-based startup in March 2016 for a reported $1 billion.

By comparison, analysts have pegged the value of Waymo as high as $175 billion.

In a media briefing on Wednesday, GM president Dan Ammann said 2019 “remains the goal for GM Cruise to launch a self-driving ride services fleet.’’

“The longstanding relationship we have with Honda will allow us to move very quickly in ramping up our efforts.”

In January, GM filed a petition seeking US approval for a fully self-driving car, one without a steering wheel, brake pedal or accelerator pedal, to enter the automaker’s first commercial ride-sharing fleet in 2019.

Ammann declined on Wednesday to provide a more specific timeline for the vehicle.

“GM has been very selective in its approach to investors in Cruise and we will evaluate other investment opportunities as they come along,” he said.

Ammann later told analysts: “We’re moving as quickly as we can to get to the point where we can initially deploy the technology and then scale it ... This is an effort that requires very, very significant resources to pull off.”

He said Honda would contribute its engineering know-how and would help Cruise build a global ride services business.

“This investment is based on a shared vision and their (GM’s and Cruise’s) superior technologies in this area,” Honda said

Cruise has a test fleet of more than 100 self-driving versions of the Chevrolet Bolt, rebadged as Cruise AV.