General Motors is acquiring SoftBank's stake in Cruise and pouring even more money into the self-driving unit it purchased in 2016. The auto giant has announced that it's buying out SoftBank Vision Fund 1's equity ownership into the company that's worth $2.1 billion. In addition, it has committed to investing an extra $1.35 billion in Cruise to replace the funding SoftBank promised in February after the self-driving car company started offering robotaxi rides in San Francisco. The automaker didn't say why it's buying SoftBank's equity ownership, but GM chief executive Mary Barra said: "Our increased investment position not only simplifies Cruise's shareholder structure, but also provides GM and Cruise maximum flexibility to pursue the most value-accretive path to commercializing and unlocking the full potential of AV technology." SoftBank, meanwhile, has recently struggled with debt and the plummeting value of its properties.

Carmera and Toyota collaborated on a mapping project in Detroit in 2019. Less than three months after acquiring Lyft's autonomous vehicle unit for $550 million, Toyota subsidiary Woven Planet Holdings made another acquisition to strengthen its position in the market. Woven Planet is acquiring HD mapping startup Carmera for an undisclosed amount. Carmera and Toyota are already quite familiar with each other. The companies collaborated on multiple projects from 2018-2020 in Detroit, Michigan, and Japan.

As expected, Uber is selling off its self-driving unit. On Monday, the company confirmed the sale of its Advanced Technologies Group (ATG) to Aurora Innovation, one of its now previous competitors in the autonomous vehicle space. As part of the deal, Uber will invest $400 million in Aurora, with CEO Dara Khosrowshahi joining the startup's board of directors. Effectively, Uber is paying Aurora to take the division off its hands. In the near term, the startup will put ATG's expertise to use on a self-driving truck it's working on.

In 2015, then Uber CEO Travis Kalanick pulled off a bold talent raid when he poached some 40 roboticists from the National Robotics Engineering Center at Carnegie Mellon. The move reportedly left the world-class engineering university reeling, and it seemed to signal that the world's hottest startup was on the cusp of making self-driving cars a reality. Now, that self-driving unit is no more, and the estimated timeline for robotaxi domination has extended well into this decade. Uber said Monday it would sell off the self-driving unit that was the result of that raid, the Pittsburgh-based Advanced Technologies Group. The 1,200-person unit will be acquired by the self-driving-tech developer Aurora.

After years of development and some shocking incidents, the next step for Uber's self-driving unit could be a sale. As first reported by TechCrunch and later Reuters, anonymous sources say Uber is in talks with self-driving tech startup Aurora about a sale, and the discussions have gone on since October. Last year Toyota, Softbank and Denso teamed up to invest $1 billion in Uber ATG in a deal that valued the self-driving focused spinoff at $7.25 billion. Meanwhile the smaller Aurora has had investments from Amazon, and deals with Hyundai but also lost one with Volkswagen last year, while counting big names like ex-Google Chris Urmson among its ranks. The risk and uncertainty in developing self-driving tech has been evident in the history of Uber ATG, which includes the death of a pedestrian and its former self-driving lead receiving an 18 month sentence for stealing tech from his former employer, Waymo.

The ridehailing giant said in a statement the round marked the first time Didi's autonomous driving business had brought in external funding since it became a standalone unit last year and was also the single largest fundraising round in China's self-driving sector.

The autonomous vehicle industry is looking a lot like a middle-school dance. Monday, Aurora and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles announced they would work together to put the startup's self-driving tech, called Aurora Driver, into FCA's commercial vehicles, including cargo vans and Ram pickup trucks. On Tuesday, word leaked that Aurora and Volkswagen had discontinued their 18-month joint effort to build an urban robotaxi system. Wednesday, Aurora and Hyundai said they're doubling down on their own partnership, with the South Korean company (and its conglomerate partner, Kia) pouring more money into Aurora's now $600 million Series B financing round. The companies will continue to work together to build Aurora's tech into Hyundai's hydrogen-powered Nexo.

A group of investors led by SoftBank Group Corp. and Toyota Motor Corp. is in talks to invest $1 billion or more into Uber Technologies Inc.'s self-driving vehicle unit, which would value the unit at $5 billion to $10 billion, said two people familiar with the talks. The investment would provide a cash injection for Uber's self-driving program, which is costing the money-losing startup hundreds of millions of dollars without generating revenue. It could also help underscore Uber's value as the ride-hailing firm prepares for a stock market debut in which its value could top $100 billion. Uber and SoftBank declined to comment. A Toyota spokesman said the automaker "constantly reviews and considers various options for investment" but does not have anything to announce.

Before I go any further, I want to give a shoutout to Steve Eisman for suggesting this title in an interview. Eisman is the managing director at Neuberger Berman, but he's best known for being portrayed by Steve Carrell in 2015's the Big Short. Lately, he's been touting two key positions in his portfolio - a short position on Tesla (TSLA) and a long position in General Motors (GM). That latter bet is based on Eisman's belief that the company's turnaround is likely to be successful and that their self-driving car unit could already be worth more than the entire parent company. In the interview with ETN, he said someday a financial writer would write about this odd phenomenon, so that's exactly what I'm doing here.

The new subsidiary, with 3.5 million yuan ($508,000) in registered capital, will design and test autonomous vehicle products and parts and may also handle business consultancy and supply chain management and logistics inquiries, the filing said. The filing listed Waymo LLC as the only shareholder of the Shanghai subsidiary. Kevin Vosen, Waymo's general counsel, is listed as chairman of the new company. Waymo executives including Chief Executive John Krafcik are also listed as senior representatives of the Chinese company. Waymo representatives couldn't be reached for comment.