Lyft begins testing self-driving cars in Boston

Taxi service Lyft starts offering rides with self-driving cars in the American city of Boston. This is done in collaboration with Nutonomy, a company that is part of cartech supplier Delphi. There are still people behind the wheel.

The cars are self-driving, but drivers are on hand to intervene in emergencies. Passengers near the Seaport area of ​​Boston can get a ride in a self-driving car, Nutonomy reports. Both companies already announced the collaboration this summer; the pilot with self-driving cars for Lyft customers has already started.

Lyft users will see a notification in the app if the car picking them up is self-driving. Nutonomy has been experimenting with self-driving cars in the Boston area for some time now, in order to map out the traffic situations.

More companies are engaged in taxi rides via self-driving cars. The best known of these are Lyft competitor Uber and Waymo, a sister company of Google. All those companies have started pilots. Expanding those tests is difficult, because for a service to start, the environment in which the self-driving cars operate must be known in detail, so that the cars can safely participate in traffic.