Last month Lyft signed an agreement with Waymo to operate ten autonomous vehicles on the Lyft booking platform. All will drive on the roads of Phoenix, Arizona. The robo-taxi offer will be identified as an option when app users go to book a ride.
Since 2018, the ride-hail company has also been cooperating with Aptiv, a Delphi subsidiary focused on mobility solutions, for the use of self-driving vehicles in Las Vegas. The use was massive last January during CES with more than 40,000 paid trips in autonomous BMW sedans. For now, there is still a driver in the taxi who takes control only in case of problems and on private properties such as hotels and casinos.
In addition, Lyft is also cooperating with Magna and the team has achieved several milestones including public-roads testing which included a public autonomous ride-sharing pilot with Level 5 vehicles for Lyft employees.
In addition to these cooperations, Lyft has invested in its own in-house autonomous-driving program, with a research and development office in Palo Alto, California working on hardware and software and the acquisition of a British company, Blue Vision Labs, a London-based startup that uses computer vision to process street-level imagery.
