General Motors and Lyft will begin testing a fleet of self-driving electric Chevrolet Bolt taxis within a year, according to a Lyft executive.
The move, reported by the Wall Street Journal, follows a $500 million investment in Lyft by GM and will rely on technology from Cruise Automation, which GM plans to purchase.
The self-driving taxi test is a direct challenge to ride-sharing app Uber, which has its own self-driving car testing center and plans to add autonomous cars to its service by 2020, according to the paper. Lyft’s self-driving test will take place in an as-yet-unnamed city with real customers who opt to ride in a driverless car—the Lyft app will allow customers to elect for driver-only service.
“We will want to vet the autonomous tech between Cruise, GM and ourselves and slowly introduce this into markets,” Taggart Matthiesen, Lyft’s product director, told the Journal.
[WSJ]
The Leadership Brief. Conversations with the most influential leaders in business and tech.
