Back in January, it was announced that GM had invested $500 million in Lyft. The reasoning for the investment was to work on self-driving cars. GM has been wanting to have their own ride-sharing program for the self-driving age, which is also why they bought Sidecar once they went out of business. Now it looks like they could be putting out some autonomous Chevrolet Bolts as soon as next year, that will actually run as part of Lyft. Now the Chevy Bolt is GM’s all-electric vehicle that is going to cost under $30,000 (it’s actually closer to about $25,000) and will be available in “late 2016”. So not only would it be an autonomous car, but good for the environment as well.
The two companies are still pretty quiet on the details about this upcoming test for autonomous Chevrolet Bolts, and they haven’t even named a city yet. It’s quite possible that it could be in Michigan, given that GM’s world headquarters are in downtown Detroit. However it’s also quite possible that the test city could be San Francisco, given that is where Lyft is headquartered and started out at. Lyft spoke with The Wall Street Journal, stating that they “will want to vet the autonomous tech between Cruise, GM, and ourselves and slowly introduce this into markets.” For those that might be unaware of what Cruise is, they are referring to Cruise Automation. It’s a three-year old autonomous car company that GM purchased back in March.
On top of testing out autonomous versions of the Chevrolet Bolt next year for Lyft service, GM is also planning to rent the Chevrolet Bolt to Lyft drivers to do their job essentially, instead of using their own personal car. GM is already renting out Chevy Equinox models to Lyft drivers. So they are looking to expand the program past the Equinox and include the Bolt, which is one of the most talked about models from GM in quite some time – largely due to it being an all-electric vehicle and being under $30,000.
The autonomous car industry is about to get pretty packed. We have Alphabet who just inked a deal with Fiat Chrysler to use some of their 2017 Pacifica minivans in their test driving fleet, we also have Uber who is working on their own self-driving vehicles. Not to mention other auto makers, like Ford who is also testing the Ford Fusion on a test track in Ann Arbor, Michigan.