General Motors self-driving unit, Cruise has just bought Strobe, a self-driving start-up company. General Motors made the announcement of the purchase earlier this week that it is teaming up with Strobe in the race to take over the self-driving market. The company also plans to hire Strobe’s engineering team to work for its Cruise Automation unit.

General Motors and Ford have stated earlier that they are working on making self-driving cars available by the year 2021. However, a market report suggests that autonomous cars would be available in the market (although in limited form) by 2020.

General Motors

In 2016, GM joined the race for the self-driving market after it bought Cruise  and announced plans to invest in different self-driving startups like Nauto and others. Earlier this year, GM’s self-driving car unit, Cruise hired some famous car hackers – Charlie Miller and Chris Valsek – to work with them on ways to speed up the self-driving manufacturing processes and to lead driver-assist development project..

With all these active steps taken, General Motors  is now been considered a threat by some to the Silicon Valley companies like Tesla and Alphabet, who are also working on their own self-driving projects.

In a statement made by Kyle Vogt, Cruise Automation founder, “Strobe’s technology will significantly improve the cost and capabilities of our vehicles so that we can more quickly accomplish our mission to deploy driverless vehicles at scale.”

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Strobe is a self-driving startup company that manufactures it own LIDAR technology – a software that enables the autonomous vehicle to see it surroundings. Vogt wrote in the company’s post that the most interesting thing about Strobe is that it has worked on LIDAR and has reduced it array into a single chip which will definitely reduce the cost of production by around 100%. In addition, Strobe’s product will also hasten the manufacturing and deployment of self-driving cars into different areas.

Autonomous cars to be available earlier than expected

Earlier this year, California regulatory filings have revealed that General Motors is far behind Alphabet’s Waymo in the areas of self-driving car testing. However, with all the moves made by GM, some Wall Street analysts have predicted that General Motors is catching up fast and that the company is ready for the competition ahead. In fact, based on the California DMV accidental reports, General Motors is surely logging up plenty of miles and certainly getting ready to dominate the self-driving vehicle industry.

Kyle Vogt also said in an interview with some reporters that GM is fully prepared to unfold its self-driving car as soon as possible. This is because the company has been testing its vehicles in more complex areas, unlike its rivals. In his words, “driving in San Francisco is almost nothing like driving in the suburbs or other places where self-driving cars are tested”.

Interestingly, a Deutsche Bank analyst, Rod Lache has predicted that General Motors can win around 17.5% share of the autonomous market for itself if it sustains its current momentum in the self-driving space. According Lache in a September research note, “GM’s AV’s will be ready for commercial deployment, without human drivers, much sooner than widely expected (within quarters, not years), and potentially ahead of competitors.”