Autonomous and electric taxis in Las Vegas
Lyft is one of the companies that is contributing the most in the autonomous car sector. In fact, it intends to implement a massive fleet of this type of vehicle in 2023, and for this it has partnered with the autonomous car developer Motional.
The goal of this partnership is to upgrade the autonomous taxis it already has in Las Vegas to fully electric models.
They will be IONIQ-5 cars, and they will use the Hyundai platform. They have L4 autonomy, capable of driving and making decisions without the driver saying or doing anything, and use continuous learning to increase safety as they drive.
It won’t be easy to get to level 4 on a large scale, as it’s a level that has only been tested in tight, controlled environments, but they want their vehicles to be able to recognize and safely navigate unpredictable roads, not just closed circuits. , being able to “coexist” with human drivers in other cars.
A ride-sharing company, Rideshare, wants to adopt this model, to use those cars, to avoid price gouging in ride-sharing due to massive labor disputes and rising wages. Motional and Lyft have experience, they’ve been running self-driving rides in Las Vegas since 2018, taking over 100,000 passengers from one location to another and receiving 95% 5 stars.
An electric, autonomous and shared future, that’s what they want at Lyft, where passengers just have to ask for the car, wait and enjoy the ride.
In 2023 it will be scaled to several cities in the United States, when users will use the app to unlock the doors and start the trip and when new screens will be available during the trip.
The advantages are enormous, since autonomous cars will be constantly circulating around cities waiting for passengers, with a number of vehicles proportional to the existing demand at any given time. Nothing to wait more than an hour for a Taxi at dawn, that is the goal of Lyft.
Source: motional.com
