Ford has announced that it has teamed up with Lyft to bring autonomous vehicles mainstream. In a post on Medium, Ford’s vice president for autonomous vehicles and electrification Sherif Marakby states that both companies have joined forces to help make transportation accessible, affordable, and reliable in the future. The automaker’s self-driving vehicles and Argo AI’s virtual driver system will play key roles in improving the infrastructure for autonomous vehicles by providing the necessary systems that will make the technology easier to access. Earlier this year, Ford announced a partnership with Domino’s Pizza to test autonomous vehicles for delivery services.
The partnership with Lyft will see both companies share knowledge with Ford providing know-how on autonomous vehicle testing development and large-scale manufacturing. Lyft, on the other hand, has data on transportation and traffic flow, and a large customer network in urban areas. Both companies will collaborate in developing the most efficient ways to dispatch autonomous vehicles, selecting the right cities to work with, and determining the infrastructure needed to service and maintain the cars. Marakby points out that Ford and Lyft are more focused on creating a service based on what consumers needs and wants. This of course isn’t the first automotive partnership for Lyft. Earlier this year Lyft partnered with Waymo on autonomous tech, and GM and Lyft have a similar partnership focused on autonomous taxis.
In the beginning, Ford and Lyft will deploy vehicles being driven by people and connect the former’s self-driving test vehicles with the latter’s network; however, there is no plan to put passengers in them until it’s certain that the technology is reliable. Self-driving cars will then be deployed alongside its current pool of drivers. Both companies want to make sure that the experience between a human-driven and a self-driving vehicle are similar and that customers won’t notice a difference.
Ford expects the partnership with Lyft to help accelerate its self-driving vehicle program and expects that it will help bring autonomous driving tech to the mass market in a safe manner.
Source: Ford via Medium
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