(Bloomberg) -- Honda Motor Co.'s chief executive officer appeared to walk back a previously announced plan to deploy a self-driving car in central Tokyo by early 2026 in partnership with General Motors Co. and its autonomous vehicle unit Cruise.
The Japanese automaker now expects driverless vehicles to debut in urban environments by the end of the decade, CEO Toshihiro Mibe said Tuesday in an interview with Bloomberg Television.
“We're thinking of sometime in the late 2020s for introducing self-driving vehicles into an urban environment,” Mibe said on the sidelines of the CES conference in Las Vegas. “We expect to deploy more advanced systems in vehicles as the technology progresses.”
Representatives for GM had no immediate comment. Cruise has said it plans to restart robotaxi service in an unspecified city.
Shortly after Honda announced the JV in October, Cruise's license was suspended in California and GM grounded the AV fleet in the US. The Detroit-based automaker also stopped work on a six-passenger autonomous shuttle for model year 2024 called the Cruise Origin, which was to have been used by the Honda JV “in central Tokyo.”
Mibe said that while his company has dropped plans to co-develop smaller electric vehicles with GM, it will consider other such alliances with GM and other prospective partners.
“To achieve our goals, we need win-win relationships, so we're very proactive on forging alliances, and GM is one of those,” he said.
Honda has pledged to build 2 million EVs by 2030, and Mibe said it's looking to expand its battery manufacturing footprint in the US and China in line with that objective.
--With assistance from Shery Ahn and David Welch.
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