Toyota Motor Corp. is the latest investor in Southeast Asian ride-hailing startup Grab Taxi Pte. Ltd., investing $1 billion into the company to strengthen their existing partnership and expand the collaboration between them.

As part of the deal announced today, a Toyota executive will be appointed to Grab’s board of directors and a dedicated Toyota team member will be sent to Grab to as an executive officer. Toyota’s existing partnership with Grab includes developing connected services for Grab using driving data collected by Toyota’s TransLog data-transmission driving recorder.

The deal follows Grab’s acquisition of Uber Technologies Inc.’s business in the region in March in return for Uber taking 27.5 percent stake in the company. The new investment brings Grab’s total amount raised to about $5.1 billion. Toyota joins companies that include Hyundai Motor Co. in January and Didi Chuxing and SoftBank Group Corp. in July, which invested in the company as part of a Series G round.

For Toyota, it’s another investment in a ride-hailing startup, since the company also invested in Uber in 2016. The Japanese car maker also wants its own slice of the nascent self-driving car business, announcing a $2.8 billion plan in March to form a new company dedicated to developing autonomous driving technology.

In an interview with SiliconANGLE’s video studio theCUBE in May, Smail Haddad, senior information technology director of data governance, data delivery and architecture at Toyota Motor North America, said the company has built big-data solutions that allow it to aggregate and analyze data for future innovation. “The perfection of safe, reliable, self-driving cars, in particular, will require tons of quality data,” Haddad noted.

Discussing the broader market implications of the Toyota-Grab deal, Pinar Ozcan, professor of strategic management at the Warwick Business School, told SiliconANGLE that the new deal is further proof that the sharing trend is here to stay.

“As we are going more and more towards a future dominated by Connected, Autonomous, Shared and Electric cars, auto manufacturers are realizing that making cars for private ownership will not let them survive in the long run,” he said. “This is especially true for metropolitan Asian cities that are fighting premature deaths due to air pollution and where governments are forced to take severe measures to stop the trend (in China, average life expectancy is expected to increase by over 2 years if air pollution is reduced).”

Photo: Duncan Riley