GM & Lyft Wasting No Time, Want to Try Autonomous EV Taxis This Year
Chevrolet and General Motors are fresh off beating Tesla in the affordable longer-range electric vehicle race. No, the Chevy Bolt didn’t have a million pre-orders like the Tesla Model E 3, but it kicked its ass in terms of it’s here right now (well, it arrives later this year) and does the same thing in a better-looking package (yep, just looked it up, that’s a fact). Now, GM is focusing its lenses on a different part of the technological automobile arms race that has everything to do with autonomous cars, ride-sharing, and personal driving.
Early this year, GM partnered with Lyft by investing $500,000 in the personal taxi service. GM also bought San Francisco-based Cruise Automation Inc., a company focusing on autonomous technology. With the help of those two companies, the American automaker is going straight at Tesla’s, Google’s, and Uber’s necks.
Tesla Model 3 available in 2018 or 2019 or so.
This week, GM announced a plan to start testing Chevrolet Bolt electric vehicles that are equipped with self-driving capabilities on public roads within the next year. This will also be made more possible when Chevrolet offers attractive renting and purchase options on the Bolt for potential Lyft drivers. The companies have not announced the city the testing will take place in, but the plan is to incorporate customers by giving them the option to try out a self-driving Bolt.
Naturally, all of this will be done through the Lyft smartphone app. Aside from the technology itself, the main obstacles all deal directly with state and federal regulations on the use of self-driving cars.
[Via WSJ]