Ratings for the Bay Area and California, updated every 10 minutes GM’s $1.1 billion infusion will come as soon as the deal closes. SoftBank will invest $900 million initially and $1.35 billion when Cruise’s autonomous cars are ready for deployment. “GM knows how to do large-scale industrial production,” he said. While Ammann ducked questions about where the robot taxis would launch, he said the fleets will be able to grow rapidly. “Beyond that, we see opportunities to move goods, package delivery and other use cases.” GM continues to see ride-hailing as the obvious first use for robot cars, GM President Dan Ammann said. “The complexity requires a very large number of people.”Ĭruise recently moved into new headquarters at 1201 Bryant St., from which its dozens of self-driving Chevy Bolts head out around the clock for tests on city streets with backup drivers. “Developing this technology is one of the most challenging problems of our generation,” he said. “Equity is a really attractive element of working at Cruise and will really help us in the war to acquire the best talent in the space.”Ĭruise now has 740 full-time employees in San Francico and has increased its employee count by 40 percent a quarter, a pace Vogt expects to continue. “That’s just the tip of the iceberg of what the company’s value could be,” he said. That lofty valuation, and future upside, will be a potent recruiting tool, said Kyle Vogt, Cruise CEO and co-founder. The investment values the business at $11.5 billion - a huge premium to what GM paid, which was between $500 million and a billion, depending on incentives. SoftBank will get a 19.6 percent stake in the newly formed GM Cruise Holdings LLC. “We were blown away by the ability of the Cruise team to iterate quickly, both for hardware and software (and) the ability of GM once this is ready to put production to work,” said Michael Ronen, managing partner of SoftBank Investment Advisors, which manages the fund. But the huge capital commitment from the car company and the year-old, $100 billion fund backed by Japan’s SoftBank Group, Apple and Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, among others, increases the likelihood that the deployment will happen on time and at a massive scale. GM, which bought San Francisco’s Cruise two years ago, has already said it expects to put autonomous vehicles on the road in 2019. General Motors Show More Show Lessīoosting plans to deploy self-driving cars next year, the SoftBank Vision Fund will invest $2.25 billion in General Motors’ Cruise unit, and General Motors will invest $1.1 billion, the companies said Thursday at a news conference in Detroit. Photographer: Noriko Hayashi/Bloomberg Noriko Hayashi / Bloomberg Show More Show Less 4 of4 The interior of the new GM self-driving car contains�no steering wheel, brake pedals or accelerator. wireless subsidiary is planning to merge with rival T-Mobile US Inc. SoftBank Group Corp.�s fourth-quarter profit topped analysts� projections, thanks to Sprint Corp.�s first annual net income in more than a decade. Gabrielle Lurie / The Chronicle 2017 Show More Show Less 3 of4 Masayoshi Son, chairman and chief executive officer of SoftBank Group Corp., gestures while speaking during a news conference in Tokyo, Japan, on Wednesday, May 9, 2018. Paul Chinn / The Chronicle 2017 Show More Show Less 2 of4 Co-founders Kyle Vogt and Daniel Kan (right) stand for a portrait at Cruise Automation in San Francisco, California, on Tuesday, March 7, 2017. The Department of Motor Vehicles is announcing proposed regulations for testing and deploying self-driving cars on public roadways. 1 of4 A Cruise self-driving car rides on 11th Street in San Francisco, Calif.
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