Lyft, Motional team up for the road
Ride-hailing platform Lyft is teaming up with self-driving car company Motional, which operates in part out of Pittsburgh’s Hazelwood Green development, to launch fully autonomous vehicles on city streets in 2023.
That means, unlike the test drives happening on Pittsburgh roads now where a human still sits in the driver’s seat prepared to take over if necessary, these vehicles won’t have anyone at the steering wheel.
“We’re at the frontier of transportation innovation, moving robotaxis from research to road,” Motional President and CEO Karl Iagnemma said in a prepared statement. “Our aim is to not only build safe, reliable and accessible driverless vehicles but to deliver them at significant scale.”
A spokesperson for Lyft would not disclose whether Pittsburgh was on the list of cities that would see the fully autonomous vehicles in a few years.
Motional, created from a newly formed partnership between vehicle manufacturer Hyundai Motor Group and tech provider Aptiv, already has been working on developing and testing autonomous technology in Pittsburgh.
Aptiv first came to Pittsburgh in 2013 and dubbed the city its main research and development center for self- driving cars, working alongside offices in Boston, Las Vegas and Singapore.
In 2019, the company moved from O’Hara to a larger space in Hazelwood that put the engineers and the vehicles they were working on under the same roof, Mr. Iagnemma told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette at the time.
Aptiv and Hyundai joined forces in March and renamed the group Motional in August.
Motional’s work focuses on designing Level 4 autonomous vehicles, or the type that doesn’t rely on a human to intervene if needed.
Now, the partnership with Lyft is meant to provide both companies with different components they may have lacked individually. Motional can offer the research and development expertise while Lyft can provide a ride-hailing network that offers
autonomous rides.
The strategy is a way to speed up commercial development of autonomous vehicles, Lyft said in a news release.
Because self- driving cars are still a long way off from being able to operate autonomously anywhere a consumer wants to go, Lyft can integrate autonomous vehicles as one component in a ride-hail network that also includes bikes, scooters and rides still powered by human drivers.
The announcement comes just a few weeks after two other big names in the self-driving car industry also joined forces. Start-up Aurora Innovation announced earlier in December it had acquired Uber’s Advanced Technologies Group, its Pittsburgh-based autonomous vehicle division.
Both companies and industry analysts said the move could provide the same benefits Lyft and Motional are now touting: a way to connect the technology to the consumer.
The agreement is “nonexclusive,” and Lyft indicated in the announcement that multiple autonomous vehicle companies could use its network.
Already, Motional and Lyft have found success working together. The two companies have been partnering to offer autonomous rides since 2018. More than 100,000 selfdriving rides later, Lyft reported 94% of passengers said afterward they would ride in an autonomous
“This partnership represents a shared mobility vision.”
Raj Kapoor, Lyft’s head of autonomous vehicle business
vehicle again.
“This partnership represents a shared mobility vision,” Raj Kapoor, Lyft’s head of autonomous vehicle business, said in a prepared statement. “Where human drivers and selfdriving cars work together to empower people to get where they need to go, without having to own a car.”