GM Cruise LLC, the high-profile unit within General Motors Co. working on autonomous driving technology, is joining forces with another automaker to speed up its efforts.

The group today announced a $2.75 billion partnership with Honda Motor Co. Ltd. to develop a brand-new vehicle designed from scratch for autonomous driving. The sum includes $750 million that the Japanese automaker will be investing directly in Cruise, giving the unit a post-money valuation of $14.6 billion.

Cruise previously landed a massive $2.25 billion funding round from GM and SoftBank Group Corp. in an investment that made the latter company a minority stakeholder. Honda’s stake is likely smaller, given that the bulk of today’s $2.75 billion investment is set to go toward engineering and go-to-market efforts.

The automaker will spend $2 billion over the next 12 years on the collaboration with Cruise, which is also set to involve parent GM. According to Honda, the purpose-built autonomous vehicle it intends to develop will be designed to “serve a wide variety of use cases and be manufactured at high volume for global deployment.” The companies will also explore commercial opportunities to deploy Cruise’s self-driving cars.

The unit is currently locked in a race with Alphabet LLC’s Waymo division to build a network of autonomous taxis. Waymo is already field-testing vehicles in Arizona and has pledged to make them available to the public by the end of the year. Cruise, in turn, has said that it plans to launch an autonomous taxi network in 2019.

Further down the road, GM intends to make fully self-driving vehicles available to consumers. The company revealed in January that it’s prototyping a radical new car model with no steering wheel or pedals that features no fewer than 42 different sensors.

Honda’s autonomous vehicle initiative, in turn, have moved more slowly. The automaker’s current target is to introduce cars with Level 4 autonomy, or the ability to drive fully independently but only under favorable road and weather conditions, in 2025. Bringing Cruise’s technology into the mix may enable Honda to shave a few years off that roadmap. 

Photo: Cruise