It looks like Lyft is hoping to catch up with Uber series of partnerships for autonomous vehicles.

Lyft announced three separate partnerships on Wednesday – with startup May Mobility, automated driving company Mobileye and smart dashcam company Nexar – all aimed at gaining a foothold in the emerging autonomous vehicle market.

In the announcement, the ride-hailing company said it signed a deal with May Mobility to launch self-driving vehicles on the Lyft app starting in Atlanta in 2025. Lyft also announced a partnership with Intel-owned Mobileye, which will allow certain vehicles equipped with AV technology to operate the ride-hailing app as well as a data sharing agreement with Nexar designed to give OEMs and operators better information to form autonomous driving systems.

This isn’t the first time Lyft has looked into autonomous vehicles. The company previously provided robotaxi service – always with a human safety driver behind the wheel – in Las Vegas through a partnership with Movement. There was a similar agreement in Austin and Miami with Argo AI. However, Motional has suspended this partnership in May after reduce its workforceAnd Argo AI closed in 2022. Lyft owned a stake in Argo and took a $135.7 million affected when the company closed its doors.

Uber, meanwhile, is working to secure deals with the biggest AV companies in the robo-taxi, delivery, and freight industries, including Waymo, Cruise, Avride, Serving robotics, Aurore Innovation, Waabiand more.

May Mobility + Lyft, from 2025

May Mobility has made a name for itself by deploying autonomous micro-transport services primarily in geo-fenced areas around the United States. The startup’s shuttles operate within campuses and to designated stops along fixed routes in cities including Ann Arbor, Michigan, Arlington, Virginia, Peachtree Corners in Atlanta, Miami and Sun City, Arizona. In May 2023, May Mobility launched an on-demand service in Grand RapidsMichigan in partnership with Via.

“Partnering with Lyft will open up new markets for us to operate in, bringing greater mobility to more people, faster,” Edwin Olson, co-founder and CEO of May Mobility, said in a statement.

The multi-year partnership with Lyft is May’s first foray into ride-sharing. May Mobility and Lyft have not said when the AVs will be deployed, how many of May’s Toyota Sienna Autono-MaaS vehicles will be on the streets, or whether May will offer group rides and shuttles, or individual on-demand transit .

In a statement, May noted that initial deployments will use safety drivers in the front seat, with plans to move to a fully driverless mode over time.

Creating a “Lyft Ready” Mobileye Network

Mobileye offers autonomous driving technology across the full spectrum of autonomy, Level 2 advanced driver assistance systems to fully autonomous Level 4 systems. Mobileye Drive, the company’s L4 system, includes everything from autonomous driving software to a sensor stack to a cloud infrastructure with a digital twin of the world.

“The next step for us is to use this Mobileye Drive cloud, or the demand gateway as we call it, to connect to the different carpooling, carpooling and public transportation networks around the world,” Christian Lichtmannecker, head of AV within Mobileye’s Mobility-as-a-Service business development unit, told TechCrunch.

In other words, any fleet of vehicles that already have Mobileye Drive – which today includes some Volkswagen, Schaeffler and Benteler Holon models – will be able to connect to the Lyft network in the future. Lichtmannecker said this allows small and large fleet operators to gain seamless access to Lyft’s platform and passenger network.

“Lyft’s goal is to connect AVs, drivers, riders and partners to create new opportunities for all,” Lyft CEO David Risher said in a statement. “Our ridesharing network will continue to evolve as millions of people have the opportunity to earn billions of dollars, whether they choose to drive, put their AV in service, or both. »

Neither Lyft nor Mobileye said when or where the first Mobileye-powered vehicles would appear on the Lyft app, but Lichtmannecker noted that both are in talks with operational and OEM partners today.

Mobileye is testing its Drive technology in Austin, Detroit and Orlando, Florida. The company is also testing how its technology handles extreme weather conditions in Norway, Germany and Israel. Mobileye is currently testing with a safety driver behind the wheel and plans to remove the driver once it has validated the safety of its technology.

Bringing Nexar smart dashcam information to audiovisual development

Nexar has used video data from its line of smart dashcams in recent years to scale a digital twin service which it sells to car manufacturers and cities.

Now, Nexar and Lyft believe that by combining forces, they will be able to give OEMs and AV companies even better insights.

The two companies will combine more than 45 petabytes of Nexar’s real-world footage covering 200 million monthly miles traveled with Lyft’s freshly anonymized and aggregated historical market data to create “a comprehensive and robust data set for AV technology development.” “.

Lyft and Nexar have not explained how they plan to share revenue from this partnership. The companies also did not say whether Lyft would offer discounted Nexar dashcams to Lyft drivers or even give drivers a discount for collecting data on the company’s behalf, although a Nexar spokesperson did stated that drivers must agree to participate.

The deal comes just months after Zach Greenberger left his role as Lyft’s chief commercial officer to become Lyft’s chief commercial officer. CEO of Nexar.