(Bloomberg) -- Lyft Inc. announced three new partnerships with autonomous driving technology vendors, including Intel Corp. spinoff Mobileye Global Inc., as it plays catch-up in offering driverless rides on its platform.
The San Francisco-based rideshare company said in a statement that it will make its platform available to all cars with Mobileye’s self-driving system, giving fleet owners a new way to make money from their vehicles. The firm did not provide a launch timeline or specify how many Mobileye vehicles will be available through Lyft.
The second deal is with Toyota Motor Corp.-backed startup May Mobility, which plans to deploy a fleet of self-driving Toyota Sienna minivans through Lyft in 2025, starting in Atlanta with a possible expansion to other markets later on. The third pact is a data partnership with dashcam maker Nexar, pairing Lyft’s data with Nexar’s video footage to build a dataset for autonomous technology research and development.
Lyft is trying to catch up with bigger rival Uber Technologies Inc., which has struck 14 autonomous-related partnerships across its ride-hailing, delivery and freight businesses. Even then, none of the new partners Lyft announced Wednesday is operating at the scale of Uber’s most high-profile collaborator in this space, Alphabet Inc.’s Waymo LLC.
Competition over driverless technology in US markets will be especially critical for Lyft since it only operates in North America. Waymo, which has come to symbolize progress in self-driving vehicles, was valued above $45 billion after its most recent funding round, Bloomberg reported last month. It operates its own consumer app and performs more than 150,000 paid trips per week in US cities including San Francisco and Phoenix. Uber offers its customers the option to order Waymo rides in Phoenix, with Austin and Atlanta to follow in early 2025.
It may take years before self-driving fleets deliver the millions of rides and the kind of margins that Lyft and Uber currently achieve, but analysts have said there’s still reason to be concerned about growing competition from autonomous vehicles. Uber Chief Executive Officer Dara Khosrowshahi said in an earnings call last week that Waymo has captured high-single-digit to low-double-digit market share in San Francisco, one of Lyft’s largest markets.
Like Uber, Lyft is renewing its focus on autonomous partnerships after it sold its expensive self-driving research unit in 2021. Lyft had a brief partnership with Waymo in Phoenix that was paused in early 2020 due to Covid. It also suspended its autonomous offerings in Miami and Austin in 2022 following the shutdown of Argo AI, the startup backed by Ford Motor Co. and Volkswagen AG that Lyft was working with at the time.
©2024 Bloomberg L.P.