General Motors and its autonomous driving division Cruise are partnering with Microsoft to accelerate the launch of autonomous vehicles.
Computers and software play an increasingly important role in the development of modern cars. This is especially the case when it comes to autonomous driving. Microsoft should continue to help General Motors and Cruise, which was acquired by GM in 2016, scale up autonomous driving technology. In particular, Azure, Microsoft’s cloud platform, plays a major role in this. Microsoft, in turn, can better serve other transportation companies around the world through the knowledge it has gained through the collaboration.
Microsoft also joins General Motors and Honda as an investor in Cruise. The parties are jointly investing another 2 billion dollars in the company. Cruise has not yet launched a car, but the company has big plans with the electric shared car Origin. In addition, GM implements Cruise’s knowledge of autonomous driving in its own models. This also applies to Microsoft’s cloud solution, which should help GM further digitize the organization.
Help from the tech sector
The collaboration between Microsoft and GM is a bit like that of Geely with Tencent, in the sense that Tencent will also help Geely to digitize on a business level. Geely goes a bit further than General Motors in its flirtation with the tech industry: the Chinese concern has already entered into partnerships with Foxconn and Baidu. Given the increasing importance of software in the development of cars, it is obvious that the car and technology industry will be able to find each other more often in the future.