GM's Cruise CEO: Honda Partnership Will Accelerate Timeline for Self-Driving Cars
*By Carlo Versano*
Shares of General Motors soared by as much as 5 percent Wednesday on news that Honda will take a stake in its Cruise unit as part of a new partnership to build an autonomous vehicle for "large-scale deployment."
"This is a great deal on the path to deploying self-driving cars at scale," Cruise CEO and co-founder Kyle Vogt said Wednesday in an interview on Cheddar.
Honda ($HMC) will bring $2.75 billion to the table over 12 years for a 5.7 percent stake in Cruise, valuing the GM ($GM) subsidiary at $14.6 billion ー that compares to a $11.5 billion valuation in May. Vogt said that Honda's engineering expertise, particularly in "space-efficient design" is a critical element of the joint venture.
The companies will work together to build an autonomous car from the ground up, Vogt said. Unlike Cruise or Google's ($GOOGL) Waymo unit of fleets of retrofitted SUVs and minivans, the mission is to completely rethink what an automobile is when a driver isn't needed ー or wanted, for that matter.
"We're removing the constraints of how cars drive today," Vogt said. "This is what comes next."
Vogt didn't give a timeline for roll-out, but he said the plan is for engineers from GM, Cruise, and Honda to first focus on a car that can be deployed in a rideshare capacity, making it "accessible to as many people as possible." In a press release, GM referred to it as "purpose-driven" vehicle, leaving the possibility open that it can be used for things like delivery, for example. The vehicle will be manufactured at a current GM plant.
A partnership of this size between two multinational auto giants shows the importance of scale as legacy manufacturers and tech start-ups jockey for position in a field that has the potential to revolutionize huge swaths of the economy.
Tesla ($TSLA) has proven how difficult it can be to produce a car "from scratch" without infrastructure in place or decades of assembly-line experience. GM and Honda have both.
For full interview [click here](https://cheddar.com/videos/gms-cruise-teams-up-with-honda-on-autonomous-cars).
At 100 years old, the Goodyear Blimp is an ageless star in the sky. The 246-foot-long airship will be in the background of the Daytona 500 — flying roughly 1,500 feet above Daytona International Speedway, actually — to celebrate its greatest anniversary tour. Even though remote camera technologies are improving regularly and changing the landscape of aerial footage, the blimp continues to carve out a niche. At Daytona, with the usual 40-car field racing around a 2½-mile superspeedway, views from the blimp aptly provide the scope of the event.
You'll just have to wait for interest rates (and prices) to go down. Plus, this deal's a steel, the big carmaker wedding is off, and bribery is back, baby!
It’s a chicken-and-egg problem: Restaurants are struggling with record-high U.S. egg prices, but their omelets, scrambles and huevos rancheros may be part of the problem. Breakfast is booming at U.S. eateries. First Watch, a restaurant chain that serves breakfast, brunch and lunch, nearly quadrupled its locations over the past decade to 570. Fast-food chains like Starbucks and Wendy's added more egg-filled breakfast items. In normal times, egg producers could meet the demand. But a bird flu outbreak that has forced them to slaughter their flocks is making supplies scarcer and pushing up prices. Some restaurants like Waffle House have added a surcharge to offset their costs.
William Falcon, CEO and Founder of Lightning AI, discusses the ongoing feud between Elon Musk and Sam Altman, and how everyday people can use AI in their lives.
U.S. tariffs on steel and aluminum “will not go unanswered,” European Union chief Ursula von der Leyen vowed on Tuesday, adding that they will trigger toug
The Trump administration has ordered the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to stop nearly all its work, effectively shutting down the agency that was created to protect consumers after the 2008 financial crisis and subprime mortgage-lending scandal. Russell Vought is the newly installed director of the Office of Management and Budget. Vought directed the CFPB in a Saturday night email to stop work on proposed rules, to suspend the effective dates on any rules that were finalized but not yet effective, and to stop investigative work and not begin any new investigations. The agency has been a target of conservatives since President Barack Obama created it following the 2007-2008 financial crisis.
