Honda Motor plans to set up a joint venture with General Motors and Cruise to start a driverless ride service in Japan in early 2026. The three companies are planning to launch the joint venture in the first half of 2024, assuming regulatory approval.
Cruise – GM’s robotaxi unit – currently offers limited ride services in San Francisco. Through this new service, the Cruise Origin — jointly developed by GM, Cruise, and Honda and purpose-built for a driverless ride-hail service — will pick up customers at a specified location and drive them to their destination entirely through self-driving. Customers will have a dedicated app on smartphones to complete the process from hailing to payment.
The Cruise Origin is a self-driving vehicle without a driver’s seat or steering wheel. And it features a cabin space that can be as private as a personally-owned vehicle and that enables 6 people to ride simultaneously, facing-to-face. This driverless ride-hail service will offer an entirely new kind of mobility experience in Japan and target a wide range of customers, including business people, families, visitors, and more.
KEY QUOTES:
“Honda has been a key partner with Cruise for several years and we’re excited to offer safer and more accessible transportation to customers in Tokyo. All of our work scaling in dense urban US markets will position us well to address the huge opportunity for autonomous vehicles in Japan.”
— Kyle Vogt, Founder and CEO of Cruise
“GM has always been invested in defining the future of transportation and that’s more true today than ever. The benefits of AVs – from safety to accessibility – are too profound to ignore and through this important partnership with Cruise and Honda, we’re bringing forward innovation that leverages our expertise in cutting-edge software and hardware to help more people around the world get where they need to go.”
— Mary Barra, Chair and CEO of GM
“Honda is striving to create the ‘joy and freedom of mobility.’ Through our driverless ridehail service, we will enable customers in Japan to experience a new value of mobility, improve the quality of their mobility experiences and offer the joy of mobility. This will be a major step toward the realization of an advanced mobility society. Providing this service in central Tokyo where the traffic environment is complex will be a great challenge, however, by working jointly with Cruise and GM, Honda will exert further efforts to make it a reality.”
— Toshihiro Mibe, Global CEO of Honda
