Lyft’s belief that self-driving cars are the way of the future are pretty well-known. In fact the company has made no secret that they are interested in the technology and have teamed up with various companies, such as Waymo and Jaguar to help further develop the technology for the future.However it looks like Lyft has decided that they want to make the development of self-driving cars one of their primary focuses, and have since announced on Medium that they will be developing their own self-driving system, which will also be an open platform that will presumably encourage others to develop and work on it to improve it.
According to Lyft, “To be clear, we aren’t thinking of our self-driving division as a side project. It’s core to our business. That’s why 10% of our engineers are already focused on developing self-driving technology — and we’ll continue to grow that team in the months ahead. Their efforts will be housed in a brand-new development facility in Palo Alto, which we are calling the Level 5 Engineering Center.”
Lyft believes that their efforts will be successful simply due to scale. The company recently announced that they were boasting 1 million rides per day which will help further their development efforts. The company does not plan to replace its drivers with self-driving cars entirely as they believe that there is still a need for human drivers, especially if the passenger requires a certain level of service, or if a place is difficult to navigate to.
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