Reuters reports that General Motors will test thousands of self-driving electric cars in partnership with Lyft in 2018:
General Motors Co plans to deploy thousands of self-driving electric cars in test fleets in partnership with ride-sharing affiliate Lyft Inc, beginning in 2018, two sources familiar with the automaker's plans said this week. It is expected to be the largest such test of fully autonomous vehicles by any major automaker before 2020, when several companies have said they plan to begin building and deploying such vehicles in higher volumes. Alphabet Inc's Waymo subsidiary, in comparison, is currently testing about 60 self-driving prototypes in four states.
Most of the specially equipped versions of the Chevrolet Bolt electric vehicle will be used by San Francisco-based Lyft, which will test them in its ride-sharing fleet in several states, one of the sources said. GM has no immediate plans to sell the Bolt AV to individual customers, according to the source. The sources spoke only on condition of anonymity because GM has not announced its plans yet.
Also at Ars Technica, TechCrunch, and The Verge.
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Lyft and Waymo have signed a deal to bring autonomous cars into mainstream use:
As the race to bring self-driving vehicles to the public intensifies, two of Silicon Valley's most prominent players are teaming up. Waymo, the self-driving car unit that operates under Google's parent company, has signed a deal with the ride-hailing start-up Lyft, according to two people familiar with the agreement who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. The deal calls for the companies to work together to bring autonomous vehicle technology into the mainstream through pilot projects and product development efforts, these people said.
[...] The deal between Waymo and Lyft has competitive implications for Uber, the world's biggest ride-hailing company, which has recently had to confront a spate of workplace and legal problems. Lyft is a distant No. 2 to Uber among ride-hailing services in the United States, and the two companies are bitter rivals. Waymo is also competing fiercely with Uber in the creation of technology for autonomous cars and is embroiled in a lawsuit over what it says is Uber's use of stolen Waymo trade secrets to develop such technology.
Details about the deal between Waymo and Lyft were scant. The companies declined to comment on what types of products would be brought to market as a result of it or when the public might see the fruits of the collaboration.
Also at The Verge.
Previously: Uber and Lyft: Settlements, Racism, and Auto Partnerships
Google Waymo Vehicles to Hit the Road This Month
GM and Lyft to Test Thousands of Self-Driving Electric Cars in 2018
Google Spin-Off Waymo Accuses Uber of Stealing Self-Driving Tech
Lyft Pays $27M to Settle Driver Classification Suit
Uber Tracked Lyft Drivers
Uber Engineer Must Reveal Reason for Pleading the Fifth to Judge
Uber Could Face Injunction Stopping It From Testing Driverless Cars
(Score: 4, Insightful) by c0lo on Monday February 20 2017, @01:49PM
First, they call it "ride sharing" when in fact is a taxi service... fine, a word gimmick to get around drivers accreditation and car licensing.
Now, it's sharing the ride with... a fleet of Johnny Cab [youtube.com]s
I'm starting to feel nostalgic for times when words had a straight meaning and metaphors where artifacts to be used in poetry/literature (you know? Time when news were true and cross-checked facts and propaganda was detected as such by most of the population).
I'd ask for a car analogy explanation of how the heck we got in this situation, but I'm afraid about what I could hear from the driveless car driver
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday February 20 2017, @03:01PM
I'd ask for a car analogy explanation
I mostly agree with your comment although I'd go down a general analogy path of "move fast, break things, ignore regulations" WRT unlicensed illegal taxi service meshes pretty well with untested unlicensed uninsured illegal self driving cars. They're kinda a match made in heaven.
When the car gets in a crash they're gonna need some live body to take the financial liability hit and its gonna be the paid taxi service passenger in the back seat, I mean its gotta be someone.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Monday February 20 2017, @10:37PM
> untested unlicensed uninsured illegal self driving cars
That's a little hyperbolic. The automakers did make sure that the cars would be legal by getting a green light from the CA legislature (unlike "FU ALL!" Uber). They're also licensed and insured, and I'm sure the policy rates do reflect the fact that they are indeed experimental and under test (currently, with human operators)...
I'm not sure what the current legal status of Lyft's Alt-Taxi service is... Uber is typically the ones breaking the rules they don't like to create a fait accompli before the politicos catch up.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday February 20 2017, @03:09PM
I'm starting to feel nostalgic for times when
... business plan legal section was something other than "we're a billion dollar unicorn dotcom so we're above the law and willfully ignoring it"
I mean I've written business plans for little projects and its usually all SMLLC this and state department of revenue that and its weird to see big business formally in public have their business plan legal section be a photocopy of a big middle finger pointed at a picture of the congress building. I mean I know the big corrupt banks have always been that way, but still, damn....
(Score: 2) by driven on Monday February 20 2017, @03:18PM
One piece of the puzzle: We're all suffering from information overload [techcrunch.com].
Perhaps when we each have our own personal AI assistant it will be able to help make sense of all this data for us. For example, making it easy to "follow the money", to fact check, bring up someone's history of truth vs. lies.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 20 2017, @06:44PM
Apparently we need more bandwidth, just get your new imant from Musk, that brilliant fortune teller saw this coming!
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday February 20 2017, @08:00PM
I'm starting to feel nostalgic for times when words had a straight meaning and metaphors where artifacts to be used in poetry/literature
I'm really not sure when that "golden age" existed. From my perspective, what changed is our BS detection due to lack of education. Schools used to TEACH people how to persuade (or, in more cynical terms, "lie") in classes on "rhetoric," which was a subject dating back to ancient Roman orators and part of the foundational education of scholars throughout the middle ages and into modern times. Now obviously rhetoric wasn't all about persuasion and lying, but it taught educated people the standard ways to shape how their words were perceived.
Of course, most of the common folk didn't have this "classical" education in centuries gone by, so they'd be as vulnerable to BS as they are today. But educated folk knew better. Unfortunately, with the dawn of the public high-school movement in the early 20th century, many educational reformers and designers didn't think the general population would be up for the standard "classical education," so they threw out things like Latin and Greek, logic, and rhetoric. The goal of the educational system (at least in the U.S.) was to train obedient factory workers to do basic skills like reading, writing, and math, not to teach advanced thinking skills and certainly not independent thinking.
Fast forward a few decades, and the remaining private academies for the elite started bowing to the pressure of curricular reform too, since a lot of the traditional curriculum was HARD. Why struggle through trying to sort out some philosophical text in Latin or ancient Greek when you could read The Catcher in the Rye and have fun talking about teenage angst or whatever? So rhetoric (which was often connected to Latin curricula, taught along with ancient oratory techniques) went the way of the dodo.
Is it really just a coincidence that we saw the rise of the big "advertising agencies" around this time, specifically designed to exploit and manipulate customers who no longer were equipped with classical BS technique knowledge to detect it? And now it's not just the "masses" who can be manipulated this way -- even folks with college degrees are more susceptible to rhetorical nonsense. I mean, 49% of white college grads in the most recent election voted for a guy whose entire oratorical strategy is basically a huge ad hominem fallacy, repeated again and again. (Not that the alternative was much better, but very few people seemed to see through the obvious rhetorical bluster that was designed to deflect and impair rational discussion of anything substantive. Any classically trained adolescent a century or more ago would have been utterly baffled by how anyone could take such a rhetorical smokescreen seriously.)
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday February 20 2017, @08:28PM
The loss of logic and critical thinking in education is bigger in effects than the loss of rhetoric.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford