General Motors’ self-driving car unit Cruise to access $5 billion credit line

General Motors’ Cruise self-driving car unit said on Tuesday it would gain access to a multi-year $5 billion line of credit with the automaker’s finance arm to fund its purchase of Origin vehicles beginning in early 2023.

“This bumps up Cruise’s total war chest to over $10 billion as we enter commercialization,” said Dan Ammann, the CEO of the Cruise unit.

Cruise is also funded by Softbank and Honda.

Self-driving startups are racing to build warchests to develop and scale up technology, an expensive and time-consuming process.

This past month, General Motors started to assemble the first of about 100 pre-production Cruise Origin all-electric vehicles to be constructed this summer for validation testing.

Cruise, which has been testing driverless Chevrolet Bolt electric vehicles in San Francisco, prepares to commercialize the technology in the densely populated city in months according to spokesman Ray Wert.