Ford and Lyft team up to deploy self-driving cars

Ford Motors announced today it's partnering with Lyft to put self-driving taxis on the road.

There's no cash changing hands in this specific deal, and the companies won't work together on autonomous hardware.

Instead, Ford will be putting its driverless cars on Lyft's open autonomous platform, which gives auto companies access to Lyft's logistical software and data from its network of rides. Development teams for both companies have already worked together to program their systems to communicate with each other.

Ford's autonomous test cars will also be added to the Lyft network, and will eventually be used to pick up passengers when the tech is deemed reliable enough for public use. The companies didn't provide a target date for driverless Ford Lyft cars — but with the automaker aiming to roll out full-on self-driving production cars by 2021, the cab service would likely come well before that date.

The alliance with Ford is just the latest in a long line of partnerships for Lyft, which range widely throughout the auto industry from start-ups to the biggest companies in the world.

The ride-hailing company has now teamed up with Jaguar Land Rover, Waymo, and smaller players nuTonomy and Drive.ai, which aim to bring driverless cars to the Lyft network in Boston and the Bay Area, respectively. GM invested $500 million in 2016, and rumors of another major investment from Google — reportedly as much as $1 billion — could raise Lyft's profile even higher.

But Ford is a special case. The automaker has established itself as a major player in self-driving development, investing $1 billion in start-up Argo AI and promoting the head of its autonomous development wing to CEO. Ford has the funds and incentive to strike out on its own to develop its own ride-hailing structure, but allied itself with Lyft rather than working from square one.

That decision is yet another example of a company choosing to team up for autonomous development and deployment, rather than simply dumping money and effort into a project alone. Small teams like nuTonomy's don't have much of a choice to get their cars on public roads — but Ford did.

Lyft's self-driving development partnerships are in stark contrast to bigger rival Uber, which has largely worked on its own autonomous system independently. Uber has a manufacturing deal for self-driving cars in place with Daimler, parent company of Mercedes-Benz, but will control the vehicles' deployment.

Uber is dealing with a major lawsuit brought by Waymo parent company Alphabet, which has put the ride-hailing company's self-driving program under scrutiny. That, and other scandals that have rocked Uber this year, have slowed the momentum for the program.

Uber still has one major edge on Lyft, however: Actual driverless cabs picking up passengers on roads IRL. Uber's pilot programs in Pittsburgh and Arizona are still running, even after its efforts in San Francisco famously ran afoul of regulators (the company is still testing driverless cars in California without passengers). The Pittsburgh program recently hit its one year anniversary, which Uber claims has logged a million miles over 30,000 trips.

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But Lyft now has the momentum and the partners in place to build out its network rapidly once the tech matures. Rather than putting one type of self-driving car on the roads, the company could deploy a wide range of vehicles from different makers, spreading driverless cabs more quickly than one company working on its own.

Auto companies are hedging their bets by continuing to develop their own self-driving tech; Lyft even announced plans to build out its own dedicated facility for autonomous development in Silicon Valley earlier this summer, so its not totally dependent on partners. But for the wide-scale deployment of autonomous cabs, working together will more likely bring the systems to the roads sooner than going it alone.