A year back, Lyft’s president and co-founder John Zimmer predicted that by 2021, the majority of the vehicles on Lyft network will be autonomous. Yet, the company did not show any signs of development regarding autonomous-cars technology unlike other ride-sharing platforms such as Uber and Waymo.
However, the San Francisco based company has recently announced that it is setting up its own autonomous vehicle development division and is working on new hardware and software technology for vehicle automation. The chief strategy officer at Lyft, Raj Kapoor stated that Lyft will be collaborating with different automakers who will create vehicles for them, while their company will focus on developing the software and hardware needed to make the car autonomous. Consequently, the company will be able to add self-driving cars in its network.
Lyft will also be hiring hundreds of workers for the new autonomous vehicle development division and has even leased a 50,000-square-feet engineering facility in Palo Alto.
Lyft has also teamed up with other companies such as General Motors, Jaguar, Daimler and the new MIT spin-off technology startup company NuTonomy, which develops software for self-driving cars.
On the other hand, Uber has already successfully launched its autonomous ride sharing function dubbed as ‘UberX’, and folks living in San Francisco can take advantage of it.