Boston is set to become the latest US city in which you can fire up a ride-hailing app to request a self-driving car.
A partnership between Lyft and autonomous vehicle startup Nutonomy will launch in a sparsely populated industrial park adjacent to the Boston harbor, the companies announced on Tuesday. The test vehicles won't take you anywhere useful, though, at least initially: Nutonomy says its goal is to refine the passenger experience in self-driving cars in preparation for a future where regular Lyft vehicles are driven by computers.
Tests will include optimizing routes, solving booking issues, and ensuring that the cars' software can easily communicate with passengers, according to Nutonomy. "By combining forces with Lyft in the US, we'll be positioned to build the best passenger experience for self-driving cars," the company's CEO Karl lagnemma said in a statement.
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Unlike in Arizona and Pennsylvania, where autonomous vehicles have already started picking up average Uber users, the Boston experiment isn't open to just anyone with the Lyft app, at least initially. While Nutonomy's self-driving cars are currently roaming the streets of the industrial park, near the Seaport neighborhood, Lyft CEO Logan Green explained that the company still has to secure the necessary permits from the city before it can pick up members of the public in self-driving cars, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Once that happens, rides will be free, a Lyft spokesperson told the Journal, presumably because they'll start and end within the relatively small test area. Eventually, Lyft plans to expand its US self-driving tests, and Nutonomy is scheduled to introduce its own separate autonomous ride-hailing service in Singapore next year.
Meanwhile, little has come of Lyft's other main self-driving partnership, with General Motors. The automaker invested $500 million in Lyft in early 2016, in part to focus on autonomous vehicles. Neither company has offered a timetable on when the project might start, although GM told the Journal that it is still in the works.
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