Lyft aims at a self-driving future with more partnerships

Boston’s NuTonomy to provide vehicles for ride-hailing firm.

SAN FRANCISCO — Uber is spending millions of dollars to make self-driving cars on its ride-hailing network a reality. Now Lyft, one of Uber’s biggest competitors, is striking a series of partnerships to do the same.

Lyft last week announced an agreement with nuTonomy, a self-driving car startup, that will eventually bring thousands of nuTonomy’s autonomous vehicles to Lyft’s ride-hailing network. The partnership will initially focus on research and development related to the customer experience of summoning an autonomous vehicle, Lyft said.

“Our ultimate responsibility is to bring the best autonomous vehicles to Lyft’s millions of passengers,” Logan Green, Lyft’s chief executive, said in an interview. “And since it’s very early in the development life cycle of autonomous vehicles, we’ll explore many partnerships to learn with and from partners to help figure out what passengers want.”

The agreement is part of Lyft’s broader move into autonomous car-sharing. Green has long postulated that the future of transportation will be less focused on private car ownership.

But Lyft is behind others in making inroads into that future. Uber, for example, has hundreds of engineers in Pittsburgh, San Francisco and Toronto working on its self-driving technology, and it has outfitted Volvos and Ford Fusion vehicles with cameras, lasers and other hardware for research purposes. Uber has recently been embroiled in a lawsuit over autonomous vehicle technology with Waymo, which operates under Google’s parent company.

Lyft’s approach to self-driving vehicles is different from Uber’s. It does not have teams of engineers developing technology for autonomous driving.

Green described how Lyft instead plans to be involved in multiple partnerships, whether with self-driving software developers like nuTonomy, or with automakers like General Motors, a major Lyft investor.

Last month, Lyft confirmed it will partner with Waymo on self-driving products.

Both companies have yet to disclose the details of the arrangement or what kind of collaboration is to be expected.

“We see ourselves as a kind of Switzerland,” Green said. “We don’t think there will be a single player that will win the whole autonomous vehicle game.”

Founded in 2013, nuTonomy was spun out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and, last year, raised $16 million in venture capital. NuTonomy has been testing its self-driving software with riders on public roads in Singapore for about a year, and it will begin its pilot program with Lyft in the Boston area, where nuTonomy’s headquarters are, in the coming months. Karl Iagnemma, chief executive of nuTonomy, said he looked forward to working with Lyft, as “both companies care immensely about solving urban transportation issues and the future of our cities.”

YONG TECK LIM / AP An autonomous vehicle is parked for its test drive in Singapore. NuTonomy plans a test pilot program in Boston in the coming months.