Yahoo Autos Lyft Completes 50,000th Self-Driving Ride In Las Vegas
Lyft has completed 50,000 rides in self-driving cars in Las Vegas in one year, according to the ride-sharing service.
Lyft partnered with Aptiv, a global technology company, to provide the autonomous cars.
Aptiv's fleet includes 30 versions of the BMW 5-series equipped with self-driving technology.
It took Lyft one year to complete 50,000 rides without the help of a single human driver. That's because these Lyft rides were part of a self-driving program in Las Vegas, which was a partnership between the popular ride-sharing service and global technology company Aptiv, which supplied 30 BMW 5-series cars with self-driving technology on board. Lyft recently announced the milestone along with several interesting statistics gleaned from user feedback.
The ride-hailing company claimed that-not surprisingly considering the newness of the technology-95 percent of riders reported that this was their first time riding in a self-driving car. Despite their rendezvous with unfamiliarity, Lyft said that 92 percent of riders reported that they "felt very safe or extremely safe during the ride."
When the self-driving taxis completed the first 5000 rides in August 2018, Lyft released several other stats based on feedback from users. The most interesting statistic pulled from that data was that 96 percent of riders said at the time that they would ride again.
For those unaware of how this futuristic scenario came to fruition, Lyft and Aptiv first revealed their partnership and plans at the CES technology show in Vegas in January 2018. Basically, Lyft would provide the ride-sharing application and Aptiv would provide the self-driving cars.
While most people are familiar with how Lyft works-fire up the app, request a location, ride, pay through the app-the details of a potential driverless ride are not. Aptiv says the cars in its fleet, all self-driving BMW 5-series cars, are controlled by the company's "fully integrated autonomous driving platform." These vehicles can be summoned through the app, but they will only travel on fixed routes between certain high-profile locations, and a safety driver is always on board.
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