The two cooperation partners want to demonstrate autonomous driving at the famous Consumer Electronics Show 2018
The company Aptiv arose out of the separation of the supplier Delphi. Aptiv cares about the domaine of autonomous driving especially. Furthermore Lyft is a transport service facilitator, which cooperates with many industry giants. Together they both want to offer an autonomous car service in Las Vegas at CES 2018.
Navya in Las Vegas
Nonetheless this doesn’t mean, they are alone on the market. The shuttle and the robot taxi manufacturer Navya from France offers a shuttle service in Las Vegas since December. The very next day it resulted in an accident but there was no blame on the shuttle.
Autonomous passenger car service
Unlike Navya the cooperation partners Aptiv & Lyft do not want to offer shuttle service but automated passenger cars. The point of the exercise is to show the feasibility of technology, which indicates a speedy commercialization of autonomous driving.
The passenger cars are made by Aptiv and the booking software is programmed by Lyft. The autonomous passenger cars run on the famous Strip of Las Vegas.
The car is able to drive to 20 selected points in the town Las Vegas. One of them is the Convention Center where the CES 2018 takes place every year. The car is supposed to overcome all necessary driving situations, which includes motorway driving or through tunnels, too. Thereby pedestrians and cyclists are captured by the discreetly mounted sensors.
nuTonomy & Lyft or what’s happened before
The cooperation was preceded by another collaboration: Lyft and nuTonomy. The startup nuTonomy was the first company, which tested the robot taxis in real traffic. At the time they were opearting in Singapore, afterwards they have focused on the US-city Boston where the two companies are cooperating.
Meanwhile Delphi, respectively Aptiv, took over the startup nuTomy and is therefore the cooperation partner for the project at CES in Las Vegas.
About the author:
David Fluhr is journalist and owner of the digital magazine “Autonomes Fahren & Co”. He is reporting regularly about trends and technologies in the fields Autonomous Driving, HMI, Telematics and Robotics. Link to his site: http://www.autonomes-fahren.de