Yahoo Autos A Good Bet? Las Vegas Home to New Self-Driving Fleet
Global supplier Aptiv and ride-hailing service Lyft offered up one of the more noteworthy demonstrations of self-driving technology during the annual CES showcase earlier this year in Las Vegas. It’s wasn’t just because the white BMW 5-series vehicles equipped with bright orange wheels garnered much attention along the Strip, with about 400 rides given to members of the public; it was apparent the two companies had sketched the basics for offering autonomous navigation in a ride-hailing format between certain preselected locations.
It was a mere demonstration then; now they’re making it real. The two companies expanded their partnership and launched a fleet of 30 automated vehicles in Las Vegas last week. Equipped with Aptiv’s self-driving tech, the BMWs will operate as part of Lyft’s ride-hailing network and carry members of the public. Lyft users can opt in to an autonomous ride, which will be offered at no charge, at least for the first few months. The cars will be monitored by human safety drivers.
The service will operate on fixed routes between certain high-profile locations such as popular casinos and the company will gradually expand its list of destinations. An Aptiv spokesperson said the companies intend to offer stops at more than 30 locations by the end of the year.
Chief technology officer Glen De Vos said Las Vegas is an ideal site to initiate the service.
“Vegas is great, because you have good traffic density and a lot of ridership,” he said. “You have unusual cases with pedestrian behavior and other things. This isn’t like driving in a suburb. It’s a high-complexity environment. So we see it as an exciting opportunity for us, and that’s why we decided to continue to test and develop here kind of indefinitely.”
Since CES, the software underpinning Aptiv’s self-driving system has evolved. Then, software developed by Ottomatika, a Carnegie Mellon University spinoff purchased by Aptiv in 2015, controlled perception and vehicle movement. In the intervening months, engineers have integrated software from NuTonomy, the self-driving software startup Aptiv acquired in 2017 for $450 million.
Further, Aptiv has enhanced its mapping of the city. During the CES demos, vehicle systems controlled their own movements along public roads, but human safety drivers retook control in parking lots of the casinos and other destinations. An Aptiv spokesperson told C/D that the newly launched program will offer autonomous service all the way to pickup and drop-off spots in parking lots, which suggests the company has now mapped the applicable parking lots.
For Aptiv, the software-focused descendant of the supplier once known as Delphi, Las Vegas marks its fifth location for autonomous-vehicle testing. The company also has automated vehicles operating on public roads in Boston, Pittsburgh, Singapore, and the Bay Area. None of the other cities yet offer a public-facing service.
NuTonomy has been independently testing its self-driving tech in Singapore and Boston, so this is hardly the company’s first go-round on public roads. But the integration nonetheless marks a milestone for the Aptiv and its subsidiaries.
For Lyft, the partnership with Aptiv is one of several in the fledgling self-driving industry. The ride-hailing service is also involved in tie-ups with Drive.ai, Ford, General Motors, Jaguar Land Rover, Magna, and Waymo.
Nevada officials have courted self-driving and advanced-transportation testing within the state, and Navya, a manufacturer of autonomous shuttle buses, has previously conducted a pilot project in Las Vegas with buses running on a fixed loop.
As for the vehicles themselves, Aptiv’s De Vos said the BMW 5-series is a good fit for the company’s endeavors in Las Vegas, and not only because of the experience it can offer luxury-minded customers in a city built on tourism.
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He said Aptiv was seeking “a really solid platform into which we could put our technology, and the BMW vehicle has turned out to be a great choice from the electronic architecture standpoint and for the drive-by-wire controls and interfaces. We were able to work closely with their engineers to understand, ‘If I want the car to do this, here’s how I do that.’”
While competitors have similar projects afoot elsewhere, the confluence of Aptiv’s technology, BMW’s vehicles, and Lyft’s network of riders, all in a city teeming with tourists looking to get around town, makes this one well worth watching.
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