When companies bandy around numbers in the billions for a partnership, taking a bird’s-eye view of the situation helps to see the reasoning behind this monumental partnership.
Cruise automation headquartered in San Francisco, Calif. has been in the driverless car business for the better part of four years since October 2013. Honda is looking to leverage what they’ve learned from this Bay Area based driverless car company by partnering with the GM backed company. As per Honda in an official press release they dropped earlier today (Oct. 3, 2018) Honda pledged a gargantuan $2.75 Billion to be paid over twelve years that will see both titans of industry produce an autonomous vehicle, a mix of GM and Honda tech. Along with this announcement is a teaser image of a prototype they’ve supposedly already collaborated on. Check out that teaser image below.
If you haven’t seen the writing on the wall, autonomous tech is being implemented into modern day cars with advanced adaptive cruise control systems standard, whether we like it or not. Tesla is on the cusp of releasing the latest version of its Tesla Autopilot which will allow all newer Tesla cars the ability to get on and off highways, enabling almost an eerie level of driving experience for long distance cruising with no input from you. Of course, you’ll have to have your hands on the steering wheel for most of the driving experience.
This isn’t even the first time Honda and GM have gotten together on the same project. Older millennials will remember the Saturn Vue Redline, a GM and Honda collab that saw Saturn’s best-selling Vue SUV gain Honda’s 3.5L VTEC Engine that was already doing work in Honda’s portfolio. Most owners of this Redline Vue are left with bittersweet memories of the combination, cheap interior, and exterior mixed with a gem of an engine but a sluggish transmission, it was a partnership Honda and GM never got right.
This partnership, however, isn’t a case of mishmash-ing parts together, it’s a collaboration on a global scale that will see GM gain a foothold in Japan and other Asian countries after that. Japan is ripe for this type of autonomous tech with a general population more apt to accept rides in driverless cars intermixed in their mostly urban environments.
In return, Honda is able to get a head start in deploying its own Honda brand of autonomous vehicles with its own proprietary bodies.
This is much-needed news this week seeing sluggish US sales from the likes of Toyota, Honda, and Nissan with stock prices for all three tumbling between 1.6- three percent as reported by Reuters.
Source: Honda News.
