Honda and General Motors, two leading automakers, are teaming up to explore self-driving cars.
Honda, on Wednesday, took a $750 million equity stake in GM’s autonomous vehicle subsidiary Cruise. And the companies will spend $2.75 billion over the next 12 years as they develop vehicles that will be released worldwide. (The companies did not detail when they expected the cars to hit the road, however.)
The companies have worked together previously on electric vehicles.
“This is the logical next step in General Motors and Honda’s relationship, given our joint work on electric vehicles, and our close integration with Cruise,” said General Motors Chairman and CEO Mary Barra in a statement. “Together, we can provide Cruise with the world’s best design, engineering and manufacturing expertise, and global reach to establish them as the leader in autonomous vehicle technology – while they move to deploy self-driving vehicles at scale.”
Honda and GM are just the latest automakers to accelerate research for self-driving cars. Last September, Toyota announced it had begun working with a startup to move its autonomous vehicle research forward. The company’s also working with Amazon and Uber on the issue.
Earlier this year, Japan’s SoftBank invested $2.25 billion into Cruise. GM announced plans last November, during its investor day, to introduce an autonomous ride-sharing service using vehicles from Cruise to several big cities in 2019.