Honda is investing a cool $2.75 billion dollars in GM’s Cruise Automation subsidiary, diversifying the Japanese auto manufacturer’s investments in self-driving cars. Earlier this year, Honda also announced a partnership with Waymo to build self-driving cars.

The Honda-GM transaction places a staggering $14.6 billion valuation on privately-held Cruise Automation.

Joann Muller at Axios writes that the centerpiece of this deal (besides the cash) is Honda’s interior design expertise.

“Honda brings unique engineering talents, especially when it comes to the efficient use of interior vehicle space…Ever look inside a Honda Fit? You’ll be shocked how much room there is inside such a tiny car…getting the user experience right is the ultimate engineering challenge. Honda is the perfect partner.”

There have been a lot of concept cars in the press, highlighting what designs might be possible for self-driving cars. These concepts often strike me as similar to the fashion designs that roll down New York runways — interesting conceptually, but a far cry from the designs that will hit the mass market. So I’m excited to see what Cruise-GM-Honda rolls out for real passengers.

The happiest self-driving news I have read in a long time is that IKEA is imagining our future self-driving world. That’s right — the autonomous future is balsa wood, tiny hex wrenches, and pictographic assembly instructions.

Somewhat more specifically, the concepts are developed by Space10, a Danish design lab with confusing connections to IKEA. Space10 itself doesn’t seem to mention IKEA on its website. But IKEA published a 2016 blog post in which it refers to Space10 as its “secret design lab.”

In any case, the concepts include:

• Office on Wheels
• Cafe on the Go
• Mobile Healthcare
• Farm Fresh Delivery
• Augmented Reality Joyride
• Sleepover Hotel on Wheels
• Pop-Up Store

Check it out!

I love seeing a new self-driving vehicle hit the streets that the general public can ride. So I am excited to read about ELA, a shuttle powered by EasyMile.

Ela is testing this month in the great Canadian north — Edmonton and Calgary, Aberta. It’s a limited time trial, but the good news is that anybody can sign up.

All you have to do is get to Edmonton. It’s a hike, but they have an awesome mall there.

Last week I had the honor of making my first trip to Kiev, Ukraine, to speak at Navimotive, the largest autonomous vehicle conference in Eastern Europe.

It is so exciting to meet software engineers from all over the world who are working on autonomous vehicles. This is particularly true Ukraine and other geographies that are new participants in the world of autonomous vehicles.

The event was hosted by Intellias, an automotive software firm with over 1,000 engineers. It is fantastic that there are engineers in places like Kiev and Lviv and Odesa working in C++ on similar problems as engineers in Bavaria or Detroit or Silicon Valley or China or India. Self-driving cars truly are going global.

The speakers came from around the globe, including:

• Green Mobility from Denmark
• HERE Technologies, which has a large Ukrainian office
• Esri, which also has a large Ukrainian presence
• OpenStreetMap

Many other international and Ukrainian companies were present as well.

My hope is that in the next few years self-driving cars will become as visible in Kiev as they are in Mountain View, and that engineers from all over the world have the opportunity to contribute to that future!

Next Saturday, September 15, I am excited to speak at Navimotive, organized by Intellias, in Kiev, Ukraine!

Self-driving cars really are becoming a world-wide phenomenon, with contributions across the entire world. Intellias is a Ukranian automotive supplier that works with companies like Volkswagen, HERE, and Yandex. There will also be speakers from GlobalLogic, CloudMade, MAPS.ME, and more.

I’ll talk about Carla, Udacity’s self-driving car, and share some information about upcoming Nanodegree programs we’re building.

You should come, too!

If you are a Udacity student in the area, please send me an email (david.silver@udacity.com) and I’d love to arrange a meetup.

A few weeks ago, Ford Motor Company published “A Matter of Trust”, a report outlining their autonomous vehicle development process. The document seems pretty clearly intended for government regulators, and indeed they sent the report to Transportation Secretary Elain Chao.

Compared to the Waymo Safety Report released last year, the Ford document is a little more dense, but broadly similar. Both documents discuss how autonomous vehicles work, what sensors are involved, and what processes are in place to ensure safety.

Ford’s document includes more detail about training and procedures for safety operators, as you might expect in the wake of the Uber ATG collision in Arizona.

Ford also share a bit more information about security. The report mentions efforts related to authentication, network segmentation, and physical partitioning.

All in all, it’s a good read to see how a larger autonomous vehicle organization operates.

For the past few months I have been writing about self-driving cars for Forbes.com. My latest post is on the potential for self-driving cars to take throughput (road capacity) and latency (speed) well beyond the plateau at which human drivers stop improving.

“Driving around Naples at 25mph for a year is a triumph, but imagine a self-driving car that can navigate Naples, safely, at 40mph? Or faster? Equipped with an array of sensors and super-computers, self-driving vehicles could react quicker and achieve safer speeds well beyond the ability of human drivers.

Similarly, US highway capacity tops out at about 2,000 vehicles per hour, assuming human drivers. Self-driving (and potentially connected) cars, however, may be able to dramatically decrease the distance between vehicles, and even move in unison with other cars. Think of a pack of bumper-to-bumper race cars traveling at 100mph. The improvement in road capacity would be tremendous.”

Read the whole thing, and also check out the Benedict Evans post on “Tesla, software and disruption” that sparked this line of thought.