Honda today announced that it will begin a testing program for autonomous vehicles this month in Japan. This will be an early step, it says, in its journey towards creating an autonomous vehicle mobility service in collaboration with GM and its autonomous division Cruise.
Testing for the program will be run in Utsunomiya City and Haga Town in the Tochigi Prefecture. The first step in the process, Honda says, will create a high-definition map of the areas for the vehicles. These will be created using a specialized vehicle for mapping.
Once the map is created, the Cruise AV you see in these pictures will start driving the areas’ public roads and developing its software to adapt it to the environment and Japan’s rules of the road.
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Although these early tests are being conducted by both Honda and Cruise, the Japanese automaker plans to create its own autonomous vehicle service in Japan. That said, it will still use the Cruise Origin, a vehicle jointly developed by it, Cruise, and GM.
The partnership between Honda and GM, though stretches back to at least 2018, when they announced they would be working together on EV batteries. In 2020, the companies announced that they would be working together on two EVs based on GM’s Ultium platform.
In January of this year, meanwhile, Honda announced that it would collaborate with GM and Cruise on their autonomous vehicle.
“This collaboration with Cruise will enable the creation of new value for mobility and people’s daily lives, which we strive for under Honda’s 2030 Vision of serving people worldwide with the joy of expanding their life’s potential,” president and representative director of Honda Motor Co, Takahiro Hachigo, at the time. “Through active collaboration with partners who share the same interests and aspirations, Honda will continue to accelerate the realization of our autonomous vehicle MaaS business in Japan.”
