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The self-driving-car subsidiary of General Motors (GM) is getting help from one of its parent firm’s chief rivals.
San Francisco-based Cruise Automation announced Wednesday morning that Honda Motor Corp. (HMC) will help build its next autonomous vehicle and kick in about $2 billion over the next dozen years towards that project, plus an equity investment of $750 million.
“It marks another step in our journey towards a world with zero crashes, zero emissions and zero congestion,” GM chairman and CEO Mary Barra said during a press call.
Honda executive vice president and representative director chief operating officer Seiji Kuraishi added: “We are passionate about providing sustainable mobility products.”
The product of this joint venture will represent Cruise’s second self-driving car — its first, based on GM’s Chevy Bolt electric car, is already in tests with a rollout still planned for 2019.
Executives on the call declined to get into any details about when the fruit of this collaboration would begin rolling off assembly lines and where those assembly lines might be.
Michelle Krebs, executive analyst with Autotrader, wrote in an e-mail that this move represented “a significant milestone in moving self-driving closer to reality.”
In a Medium.com post, Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt noted that it usually takes four years and a billion dollars to bring a new vehicle to market. “It’s our intent to move as quickly as possible,” he told Yahoo Finance in an interview after the call.
Vogt’s post shows a black-and-white photograph of the front of a streamlined vehicle that looks a lot like a wheeled version of one of Star Trek’s shuttlecraft.
“I think it’s fair to say that this vehicle will look distinct from most cars that are on the road today,” Vogt said.
“Shouldn’t the car of the future have giant TV screens, a mini bar, and lay-flat seats? Maybe it should,” he wrote in that post. “We’ve been quietly prototyping a ground-breaking new vehicle over the past two years that is fully released from the constraints of having a driver behind the wheel.”
This won’t be a car you can buy, however. As with its Bolt-based car, Cruise plans to make this one available as a service. “Ride-sharing customers and potentially other customers would use this as a fleet model,” he said. “That’s the right way to bring this to market.”
This is not the first time Cruise, which GM bought in 2016, has opted to bring in outside expertise. It hired security experts Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek—the duo who remotely hacked a Jeep Cherokee in 2015—to secure its vehicles, with the fleet model’s centralized control of software updates a big part of that.