General Motors-owned Cruise Automation has received a healthy new investment, courtesy of SoftBank Vision. GM and the firm announced on Thursday a $2.25 billion investment to strengthen the company’s self-driving car development.
Following the deal’s closure, GM itself plans to invest another $1.1 billion.
“Our Cruise and GM teams together have made tremendous progress over the last two years,” said GM Chairman and CEO Mary Barra. “Teaming up with SoftBank adds an additional strong partner as we pursue our vision of zero crashes, zero emissions and zero congestion.”
SoftBank’s investment will come in two waves: the firm will first invest $900 million upfront as Cruise Automation continues its work on developing its self-driving car platform and the 2018 Chevrolet Bolt EV-based Cruise AV. The second wave of funds will come when Cruise is prepared to the self-driving cars for commercial deployment. Then, the firm will release the remaining $1.35 billion.
With the $2.25 billion investment, SoftBank will own a 19.6 percent stake in Cruise.
GM and Cruise have continuously worked to reach a self-imposed goal to bring self-driving cars to market at a commercial scale in 2019. It’s unclear where the companies plan to launch the autonomous vehicles to start. Meanwhile, rival Waymo has plans to being its first robo-taxi service sometime this year.
With the latest investment, GM Cruise is now valued at $11.5 billion.
Comments
GM Share Price jumped 10% this morning based on this news.
and tesla’s stock dropped a couple of percent today. i’m thinking investors were hoping softbank would throw a few billion their way.
that might be a stretch but based on autopilot crashes, they aren’t the leader in self-driving vehicles they pretend to be.
It’s always interesting to talk about this technology. I have just read an article about this at https://www.lemberglaw.com/self-driving-autonomous-car-accident-injury-lawyers-attorneys/. I think there are still so many aspects that need to be fixed and developed by the automakers and also the authority before making these self-driving cars a public consumption. I hope those car manufacturers realize this problem, so they won’t waste any more life.