Lyft to launch self-driving cars on San Francisco area roads
No start date given for pilot fleet of autonomous cars.
Self-driving Lyfts are coming to the Bay Area, promising to give area residents a firsthand look at the technology that’s poised to dramatically change the nature of transportation.
Lyft will launch a pilot fleet of self-driving cars to pick up local passengers, the San Francisco-based ride-hailing company said Thursday, though it didn’t reveal a start date.
The announcement comes as Lyft is accelerating its efforts to dominate the self-driving car market and compete with the likes of Uber, Google and Tesla — Lyft recently opened a new autonomous vehicle hub in Palo Alto, Calif., and earlier this summer announced plans to bring self-driving cars to Boston.
Now Lyft plans to unleash autonomous vehicles on busy Bay Area roads, where they will have to interact with local drivers, bicyclists and pedestrians, representing a crucial test of the technology. Lyft has teamed up with another startup, Drive.ai, which already has obtained the necessary permits from state regulators to test self-driving cars on public roads.
The partnership is a signal that Lyft learned its lesson from the failure of competitor Uber’s self-driving car launch in San Francisco last year.
Drive.ai, born from Stanford University’s Artificial Intelligence Lab, has been testing its self-driving cars on California roads for more than a year.
“The majority of the world hasn’t seen autonomous vehicles,” said Drive. ai co-founder and president Carol Reiley. “For them to have a chance to actually ride in an AV car is just so exciting. We really want to start making this a reality and start bringing this to real customers — this isn’t just a demo.”
Lyft customers will be able to opt in to the pilot program, and when they use the Lyft app to summon a ride, they might be matched with an autonomous car free of charge. A safety driver will be behind the wheel, ready to take control if needed, Reiley said.
The cars, which will belong to Drive.ai, will be four-door sedans outfitted with Drive. ai’s self-driving sensors and software.
Because Drive.ai already has the California permit, Lyft may avoid repeating the fiasco that was Uber’s San Francisco autonomous vehicle launch. Uber rolled out a fleet of self-driving cars in December, but the ride-hailing giant refused to apply for the $150 testing permit. After a contentious, weeklong stand-off, the California Department of Motor Vehicles pulled the Uber cars’ registrations and forced them off the road.
Uber finally backed down in March and agreed to apply for the permit, which the DMV granted. Now Uber’s cars are back on the streets of San Francisco — but not picking up passengers. recently invested in online meals company Freshly, which delivers cooked meals to customer’s doorsteps that it says are gluten-free and don’t contain refined sugars. In 2012, Campbell Soup bought natural foods maker Bolthouse Farms.
And Thursday, rival Unilever said it was buying Pukka Herbs, a small but fast-growing organic herbal tea business.
“This segment has been identified for us globally as a key area a few years ago,” said Wayne England, head of strategic food operations at Nestle. “Giving the world better access to vegetarian-based or plant-based food is something we want to do.”
Nestle, which is based in Vevey, Switzerland, said Sweet Earth, which reportedly had $25 million in revenue last year, will remain a stand-alone business, and stay at its headquarters in Moss Landing, Calif. It declined to specify the cost of the deal.
Sweet Earth co-founder Kelly Swette, who will continue to run the company with co-founder and husband Brian, said in an interview: “We believe in redefining frozen food.”
She said several companies approached Sweet Earth about a buyout, but declined to name them.The deal with Nestle, she said, will help get Sweet Earth into more frozen food aisles. It’s currently in more than 10,000 stores, including Walmart and Whole Foods. England said Nestle wants to protect and grow the Swette’s relationship now with 273 Whole Foods stores.
Sweet Earth’s best-selling products are its burritos, but it also sells other frozen meals, including mushroom ravioli and veggie burgers.
“At the moment, if you look at the range at Sweet Earth, it’s very much handheld: burritos, this kind of (product),” Nestle’s England said. “We think we can work with them to extend it into frozen meals. We can help them accelerate.” Nestle says the deal will give it “immediate entry” into the plantbased foods segment that is expected to be a $5 billion market within three years. It says up to half of all U.S. consumers are seeking more such foods in their diet.
It said the Sweet Earth acquisition is aimed to complement its growing vegetarian, plantbased offer in Europe, such as “charcuterie vegetarian” — essentially plant-based cold cuts — under the Herta brand in France, and the launch of the Garden Gourmet line. It says the market has been growing in high double-digit percentage rates.
At its core, the deal is about Nestle’s need to constantly adapt to changing consumer tastes, particularly among health- and “authenticity”-minded consumers like many millennials these days.
Such consumers “look for more transparency, more natural, more ingredients they understand, that can relate to their own kitchens,” England said. “We have a drive to find the trend of authenticity in every one of our products.” “We would see this Garden Gourmet brand being our Sweet Earth of Europe, and then within that, we would look for the products to be shared,” England said.