Honda commits $2.75 billion in partnership with GM’s Cruise

Honda will commit $2.75 billion as part of an agreement with GM and its self-driving technology subsidiary Cruise to develop and produce a new kind of autonomous vehicle.

As part of the agreement, Honda will invest $2 billion over the next 12 years into the effort. Honda is also making a direct equity investment of $750 million into Cruise, which pushes the company's valuation up to $14.6 billion.

This new vehicle, described by GM president Dan Ammann as the "next evolution in the future of transportation," will be produced at high volume for global deployment.

Cruise founder and CEO Kyle Vogt didn't elaborate what this next-generation autonomous vehicle might look like. But during a call with TechCrunch on Wednesday he used words like "innovative," "space-efficient" "and multi-purpose."

"When you have the chance to design a vehicle from the ground up, we're not limited to thinking from the perspective of, ok there's an autonomous vehicle that looks and feels like an existing vehicle, what can we do with it?" Vogt said. "It lets us invert the problem and think from first principles of what we can do with a vehicle that's built from scratch."

In other words, don't expect it to look like a Chevy Bolt, or any other "car-like" vehicle.

The three companies plan to "explore global opportunities for commercial deployment of the Cruise network."

"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," GM Chairman and CEO Mary Barra said 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."

The milestone agreement follows the giant $2.25 billion investment made by Softbank's vision fund in May.