softbank mass production driverless cars

'We are extremely pleased to announce GM is leveraging the strength of its balance sheet to capitalize on the opportunity to increase its equity investment in Cruise and advance our integrated autonomous vehicle strategy,' said GM Chair and CEO Mary Barra. The efforts have created significant value for both GM shareholders and Cruise's minority shareholders. Over the past several years, Cruise has been working to launch an autonomous ride-hailing service that's similar to Uber using a fleet of Chevy Bolt EVs outfitted with technology for autonomous driving.

'Cruise and GM's continued partnership as well as GM's financial strength and manufacturing scale are significant enablers and key differentiators for Cruise as we accelerate our progress and enter this next phase of commercialization.'Ĭruise has made significant progress to develop self-driving cars that can navigate the busy streets of San Francisco without human intervention. 'GM's increased investment illustrates its commitment to Cruise and our mission of creating a better world by deploying driverless cars at scale,' said Vogt. In his place, Cruise CTO and co-founder Kyle Vogt was reinstated as CEO of the company, a job he formally accepted three weeks ago. In 2018, GM appointed former President Dan Ammann as CEO of Cruise, but he unexpectedly left the company just over three months ago.

The goal of the investment was to help GM jumpstart its own development of self-driving technology, which Cruise did.

GM acquired a majority ownership stake in Cruise in 2016 for around $1 billion, back when the company was a relatively unknown autonomous driving startup. General Motors announced on Friday its acquiring SoftBank Vision Fund's equity ownership stake in San Francisco-based autonomous driving technology developer Cruise for $2.1 billion.Īs part of the massive investment, GM is separately making an additional $1.35 billion investment in Cruise, replacing a previous commitment made by the Softbank's Vision Fund fund in 2018.

Softbank mass production driverless cars