Lyft, GM Forge $500M Partnership Toward Self-Driving Cars

The GM-Lyft deal comes as automakers and Silicon Valley companies are exploring new alliances and new technologies that will reshape the global automotive industry. But the new partnership has also clearly set its sights on the long-term goal of developing a robotic version of current ride-sharing services such as Lyft and Uber. A fleet of self driven cars that can work on the Lyft platform, as GM thinks of it to be the future of Taxi aggregation services.

Lyft competes heavily with ride-sharing service Uber, and a year ago Uber announced that it would fund a department at Carnegie Mellon to research driverless cars.

Under the terms of the deal, GM will invest $500 million into Lyft to support the company’s continued growth.

General Motors President Dan Ammann (center) with Lyft Inc.co-founders John Zimmer (right) and Logan Green (left) General Motors President Dan Ammann with Lyft co-founders Logan Green and John Zimmer.

General Motors has partnered up with the ride-hailing company Lyft to create an integrated network of on-demand autonomous vehicles in the U.S. Those vehicles will tap into GM’s OnStar service, while GM and Lyft promised “personalized mobility services and experiences”, but did not elaborate. Last month, Saudi Arabia billionaire Prince al-Waleed bin Talal invested more than $100 million in the company. GM also becomes Lyft’s preferred vehicle provider, improving chances that drivers will be behind the wheel of a Chevrolet, GMC, Cadillac, or Buick.

The speed of change will be very fast as tech companies such as Google, NVIDIA, Tesla and tier one auto suppliers race to develop autonomous technology.

Lyft said Monday that it has closed all of that round. The company has raised $2 billion since 2013 and is now valued at $5.5 billion, post-money – still a long ways from its main competitor Uber, which is valued at more than $60 billion.