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Lyft has secured another partnership with a major automaker in its quest to advance self-driving technology. The company, which is based in San Francisco, said Wednesday it has signed an agreement with Ford to develop and deploy autonomous vehicles on its ride-sharing network, which Lyft says operates almost a million rides every day. Within the next eight years, Lyft executives project that will mushroom to 1 billion annual rides. That’s a big potential customer base for Ford’s self-driving cars.
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There’s no immediate time frame for the deployment, but Ford indicated it will be a gradual process that starts with riders hailing Ford development vehicles that still have human drivers behind the wheel. Eventually, these will give way to self-driving vehicles, which Ford has previously said it expects to be commercially deployed by 2021.
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–– Sherif Marakby, Ford
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“We don’t plan to put customers in them until we are certain our technology delivers a positive, reassuring experience where we can gain meaningful feedback,” wrote Sherif Marakby, Ford’s vice president of autonomous vehicles and electrification.
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That starts with figuring out how Ford’s systems work with Lyft’s app. Lyft and Ford want to ensure that it’s easy for Lyft’s platform to dispatch the company’s self-driving vehicles, and the companies need to determine how to share data on which cities might be best suited for initial deployments.
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The two companies also will join forces on creating the infrastructure within cities that will enable cars to be quickly dispatched to eager riders. Last year, the automaker created a City Solutions division; it has forged relationships with city planners and transportation officials on a city-by-city basis that is likely to be valuable to the combined efforts with Lyft.
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Ford’s autonomous program ranks as the front-runner in the fledgling industry, according to an examination conducted by consulting firm Navigant Research. Even so, Ford has undergone dramatic changes in recent months. In February, the company acquired a majority stake in Pittsburgh-based Argo AI to speed development of artificial intelligence. Marakby returned to Ford from Uber to head autonomous developments, and, at the top, a change of CEOs was made in part to speed progress in the development of future-mobility revenue streams.
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“We’re still looking at 2021 as the goal,” said Bryan Salesky, chief executive officer at Argo AI, speaking broadly about the companies’ autonomous intentions. “This is what the whole team is rallying around at Ford and Argo, to get a production-worthy system on the road by then that can operate as part of a shared, driverless fleet of vehicles for ride sharing or to deliver goods, whatever the use case may be.”
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If it’s possible, Lyft has moved even faster. In recent months, the company, in which Ford competitor General Motors holds a $ 500 million stake, has begun testing autonomous Chevrolet Bolt EVs and announced partnerships in the self-driving realm with the likes of Waymo, Jaguar Land Rover, and software startups nuTonomy and Drive.ai. Back in July, Lyft executives also said they’re starting their own self-driving lab in Silicon Valley that will employ hundreds.
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While the company’s strategy has the appearance of a scattershot approach, Lyft has also positioned itself at the nexus between software developers and automakers at a time when its chief rival, Uber, is floundering. Last week, transportation officials in London stripped the company of its license to operate in the city. Meanwhile, Waymo’s lawsuit alleging Uber stole trade secrets related to self-driving technology continues, threatening to stall the latter’s progress on automated vehicles.
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All the while, Lyft has been collecting partners. In Ford, it has a big one.
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