Did you know that General Motors is doing everything they can to make Cruise, their self-driving startup, become a big deal? I didn’t, and we write about cars all the time! In any case, their startup has come through with $2 billion dollars in financing. And it’s all thanks to Microsoft. (Suppose they’re interested in entering the self-driving game.)
Now, unlike other automakers just making autonomous driving a slice of their division, General Motors just went ahead and bought out Cruise.
Why did General Motors do that? And who is Cruise?
Cruise is a self-driving startup that has been driving themselves with no hands for a while. Lately, General Motors has left major investments into Cruise simply because they have capitalized autonomous driving based on GM’s own Chevy Bolt EV. How nice!
Still, just because Microsoft puts both Cruise and parent company GM just enough over the edge, doesn’t mean other companies have stopped dropping dollars in the bank.
Cruise has somehow acrued $750 million in investments from Honda in 2018. Then, another $1.15 billion in 2019 from the same Honda folks, as well as other investors. GM and Cruise has been experimenting too. This is specific to their driverless Chevy Bolt EVs.
Cruise CEO Dan Ammann had this to say: “Our mission to bring safer, better and more affordable transportation to everyone isn’t just a tech race – it’s also a trust race.”
As for Microsoft, they’ve been pretty stoked themselves. Just look at what Satya Nadella, their CEO, said earlier: “As Cruise and GM’s preferred cloud, we will apply the power of Azure to help them scale and make autonomous transportation mainstream.”
All this said, this may be a very welcome advancement for both General Motors and Cruise as they utilize the aforementioned technology to further autonomous driving. It’s pretty crucial that this generation of automakers gets it right.