Lyft has secured another partnership with a major automaker in its quest to advance self-driving technology. The company, which is based in San Francisco, said Wednesday it has signed an agreement with Ford to develop and deploy autonomous vehicles on its ride-sharing network, which Lyft says operates almost a million rides every day. Within the next eight years, Lyft executives project that will mushroom to 1 billion annual rides. That’s a big potential customer base for Ford’s self-driving cars.
There?s no immediate time frame for the deployment, but Ford indicated it will be a gradual process that starts with riders hailing Ford development vehicles that still have human drivers behind the wheel. Eventually, these will give way to self-driving vehicles, which Ford has previously said it expects to be commercially deployed by 2021.
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?We don?t plan to put customers in them until we are certain our technology delivers a positive, reassuring experience.?

? Sherif Marakby, Ford

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?We don?t plan to put customers in them until we are certain our technology delivers a positive, reassuring experience where we can gain meaningful feedback,? wrote Sherif Marakby, Ford?s vice president of autonomous vehicles and electrification.
That starts with figuring out how Ford?s systems work with Lyft?s app. Lyft and Ford want to ensure that it?s easy for Lyft?s platform to dispatch the company?s self-driving vehicles, and the companies need to determine how to share data ...