Just when we thought that there are enough companies in the auto market working on self-driving cars, here comes another name who just joined the lot. By now we had assumed that there were no other companies left to inherit this technology but sadly, we were wrong. The new participant in the autonomous Car race gives us an idea that self-driving cars will not go out of trend or even demand for a long time now. This participant is a famous ride-hailing giant. The Lyft autonomous technology project aims to give tough competition to all its competitors despite its late entry.
Lyft has very confidently claimed that by the year of 2021, a majority of the rides by this company will be carried out by self-driving cars. This comes as a surprise that all the while there was hype about such cars in the market, Lyft showed no interest in the same. One of the major reasons behind this was that the company was not willing to invest huge chunks of money in it. Also, it would need to build cars and install such technology in those cars for this project. The ride-hailing giant thought that it would skip this tech trend. Looking at the rising demand for autonomous vehicles and other automakers' involvement, the company gave in.
Lyft has decided to have an independent project for self-driving cars.
Lyft’s decision about autonomy
On Friday, the ride-hailing giant announced that it will finally create its own technology to produce self-driving cars. Up until now, Lyft was only open to collaborating with other companies for such a project. Earlier this year, the company collaborated with Waymo for the same. According to this partnership, Waymo would develop the technology. All Lyft had to do is install this technology in its vehicles. But now Lyft has decided to have an independent project for self-driving cars.
For its autonomous driving division, Lyft will hire hundreds of people before 2018 ends. It also took up a 50,000-square-feet area of space on the first floor of the Palo Alto facility. This in itself signifies that the company does not want to wait any further to make this project happens. The company will open testing spaces and build several labs in the allotted space. With such developments, Lyft hopes to give tough competition to its consistent rival Uber. Even though it joined the race last, Lyft wants to overtake all the other companies.
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