GM Enhances Self-Driving Car Effort With Deal for Strobe
October 09 2017 - 3:36PM
Dow Jones News
By Mike Colias
Seeking to bolster its position in the race to commercialize
self-driving cars, General Motors Co. said Monday it has acquired a
company that makes lidar, laser-based sensors that helps autonomous
vehicles navigate.
The nation's largest auto maker by sales said it bought Strobe
Inc., a Pasadena, Calif.-based startup with 11 employees. Strobe's
engineers will work with Cruise Automation, the San Francisco
autonomous-vehicle developer that GM acquired in early 2016, the
company said. Terms of the Strobe acquisition were not
disclosed.
Kyle Vogt, chief executive of Cruise, said Strobe is developing
a lidar system that will be much smaller and cost a tiny fraction
of the bulky lidar sensors that the company and others now use on
their test cars.
"By collapsing the entire sensor down to a single chip, we'll
reduce the cost of each lidar on our self-driving cars by 99%," Mr.
Vogt said in a blog post.
Lidar uses lasers to measure the distance of objects in the
car's field of vision. Most autonomous-vehicle developers use lidar
in conjunction with radar and cameras to recognize other vehicles,
street signs, pedestrians and other objects.
The deal comes amid growing investor interest in the potential
of GM's stable of advanced technologies, including the
autonomous-driving system now in testing. "Businesses built off of
this platform will ramp much faster than is widely expected,"
Deutsche Bank analyst Rod Lache wrote in a client note last
week.
GM shares have risen more than 20% in the past month, to $45.26
in afternoon trading Monday.
GM has been testing autonomous Chevrolet Bolt electric cars in
San Francisco and the Detroit and Phoenix areas. The company has
said it plans to launch the technology in a commercial vehicle
network but hasn't disclosed a time frame for deployment.
GM has been making strategic investments in driverless
technology and mobility services. In addition to the Cruise
acquisition, GM also invested $500 million in ride-hailing firm
Lyft Inc. in early 2016.
Write to Mike Colias at Mike.Colias@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
October 09, 2017 15:21 ET (19:21 GMT)
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