In 2022, the field of automatic driving is still a hot land for capital investment. Cruise, an autonomous driving technology company invested by general motors, said on Tuesday that Softbank's vision fund would invest an additional $1.35 billion in it, and cruise would prepare to launch an autonomous robotaxi commercial ride service in San Francisco.
Softbank vision fund invested $900 million in the San Francisco based startup in 2018 and promised to invest another $1.35 billion when cruise was ready for commercial deployment. It was planned to be carried out in 2019, but the commercialization process was later delayed by the epidemic.
At present, in addition to having a major shareholder general motors, cruise has also received the support of important investors including Honda and Microsoft. Mary Barra, CEO of general motors, said cruise has no listing plan in the near future.
Kyle Vogt, founder and President of cruise, said in a blog post that Softbank's investment will help the company quickly expand autonomous driving technology in San Francisco and more communities.
The company also said that from Tuesday, it will open the waiting list to the public to register for free ride service in San Francisco.
However, the commercialization of automatic driving still needs a lot of investment before it is really popularized on a large scale.
As a leader in automatic driving, Google waymo's profit is still far away. Google's parent company Alphabet reported on Monday that other business units including Waymo, including Waymo, expanded to $5 billion 300 million in 2021, up from a loss of $4 billion 500 million in 2020. In the fourth quarter of last year, the revenue of the Department was $180 million, a slight decrease from a year ago. Google did not provide the Department's financial outlook for 2022.
"To truly land robotaxi, we need to ensure three preconditions, including full unmanned capability, wide coverage and high coverage density, so as to meet the needs of normal travel." Autox, a Chinese automatic driving technology company, told the first financial reporter that only by making breakthroughs in these three aspects can the large-scale landing of unmanned robotaxi be gradually completed.
Last month, auto x announced that the autonomous driving area in China totaled more than 1000 square kilometers, and robotaxi service was one step closer to large-scale landing.
Xiao Jianxiong, the founder and chairman of auto x, told China Business News many times that "all driverless" and "assisted driving" should be strictly distinguished to ensure the safety of vehicles.
Tesla recently recalled a test version of "rolling parking" function of "fully automatic driving" (FSD) through Ota. This function appeared in FSD 10.3 for the first time, allowing cars to ignore the stop signs at the intersection and pass at a lower speed. Relevant regulators believe that the name "fully automatic driving" is misleading because the term usually refers to the real level 4 automatic driving, while Tesla's system only provides level 2 advanced assisted driving. Tesla expects the next OTA version to fix the problem to be released in early February.
