Honda Will Build a High-Volume Self-Driving Car with General Motors' Cruise Automation
Honda is partnering with General Motors to spend billions of dollars on autonomous cars in a new joint-venture manufacturing deal.
Cruise Automation, the San Francisco startup GM purchased in 2016 for $1 billion, is cashing a $750 million equity stake from Honda. The Japanese automaker has also promised to drop some $2 billion over 12 years with GM and Cruise to mass-assemble a fully autonomous car that may never wear a Honda logo. Just last June, Honda announced plans to sell a Level 4 autonomous car (fully automated within a restricted area) by 2025. Whether that car will still be called a Honda is anyone's guess.
Cruise started by retrofitting Audi models with clunky roof-mounted sensor racks that demonstrated automated driving years before Tesla Autopilot and similar systems arrived. With investments now topping $14.6 billion and the support of GM-which built a small fleet of heavily modified Bolt EVs using this technology-Cruise claims to be developing its own autonomous vehicle with plans for "global deployment" at a "massive scale."
In decades past, Honda would never have relied so heavily on outside suppliers or manufacturers for such engineering exercises. But while Honda continues to develop engines, transmissions, hydrogen fuel cells, electric powertrains, and even small jets by itself, automated vehicles have appeared to stretch the company's expertise in software and sensing technologies to its limit. The timelines are shorter, too. Every automaker is racing to release automated vehicles-this despite making broad assumptions about government regulations and customer acceptance-and tech startups like Cruise are a convenient, if uncharted, R&D shortcut.
The partnership just announced involves Honda taking about a 6 percent stake in GM's Cruise Automation; this GM self-driving-car division is now valued at about $14.6 billion. Another investor, SoftBank Vision Fund, invested $2.3 billion in Cruise earlier this year.
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