Skip to main content

Lyft’s driverless cars are back on the streets of California

Lyft’s driverless cars are back on the streets of California.

Recommended Videos

The ridesharing company suspended testing of its autonomous vehicles earlier this year in response to shelter-in-place orders prompted by the coronavirus pandemic.

But with COVID-19 cases on the rise in California, it’s possible Lyft’s current testing session, taking place in Palo Alto, may be short-lived. Still, while it continues, the company insists it’s taking the proper precautions to ensure the safety of the engineers that sit inside the robot cars as they navigate the streets, according to TechCrunch.

Working in pairs, each engineer has to wear a face shield and take regular temperature checks. A physical partition has also been placed inside its driverless cars to separate the two engineers. Surfaces inside the vehicle are regularly sanitized, too.

As its name suggests, Lyft’s Level 5 program is geared toward testing technology that will allow a vehicle to drive itself without any human input. Created by the Society of Automotive Engineers, the internationally recognized rating system is made up of six categories, with Level 0 offering no autonomy, and Level 5 full autonomy.

Lyft started testing autonomous vehicles in California in November 2018 with a view to one day offering rides to customers in driverless cars. While it currently operates 19 self-driving vehicles, the company told Digital Trends that right now “less than 10” of these are on the road. In addition, Lyft had started to offer rides to employees as part of its testing program, but while COVID-19 remains an issue, only engineers will ride inside the cars.

Lyft said in a blog post on Tuesday that while its cars were off the road earlier this year, its team had been able to continue its work developing the technology using simulation software that can create specific scenarios to test the driverless system.

“Testing [autonomous vehicles] in the real world is necessary, but can also be limiting,” the company said. “Training inputs like weather and pedestrian behavior are limited to what’s happening in the world at each moment, and it can be unpredictable when you encounter a rare obstacle a second time. If reliant upon on-road miles, it may take some number of billions of miles to test everything. Simply put, the scale makes it impractical to rely only on-road miles.”

It added that simulation is cost-effective and also allows engineers to test the technology “without vehicles, without leaving our desks, and for the last few months, without leaving our homes.”

Waymo, one of the biggest players in the field of autonomous vehicles, returned its self-driving minivans to the streets of San Francisco in June, three months after it halted testing. And, like Lyft, Waymo has also been keen to talk about how, despite the suspension of on-road testing, it continued developing its technology through the use of simulation software.

Trevor Mogg
Contributing Editor
Not so many moons ago, Trevor moved from one tea-loving island nation that drives on the left (Britain) to another (Japan)…
Beleaguered robotaxi startup Cruise lays off quarter of workforce
A Cruise autonomous car.

Beleaguered autonomous car startup Cruise has laid off 900 workers, equal to about a quarter of its workforce. The news comes a day after nine executives were also dismissed.

The General Motors-backed firm has suffered a series of setbacks in recent months, triggered by an accident on the streets of San Francisco in October when one of its self-driving cars came to a halt on top of a woman, pinning her to the ground just moments after she’d been hit by a human-driven car.

Read more
GM to cut funding for beleaguered driverless startup Cruise, report claims
A passenger getting into a Cruise robotaxi.

It’s not getting any easier for beleaguered autonomous-car startup Cruise after a report on Tuesday suggested its main backer, General Motors (GM), is about to slash funding for the startup.

Cruise recently suspended nationwide testing on U.S. streets following a string of troubling incidents involving its autonomous cars, the most serious of which occurred in San Francisco last month when a Cruise car came to a halt on top of a woman who seconds earlier had been knocked over by a human-driven vehicle.

Read more
Cruise woes continue as key figures quit the robotaxi firm
A Cruise autonomous car.

Cruise co-founder Daniel Kan has quit the beleaguered autonomous car company, Reuters reported on Monday.

His departure as chief product officer comes a day after Cruise co-founder and CEO Kyle Vogt announced he was leaving the company that the pair set up 10 years ago.

Read more