Lyft Inc is expanding its roster of automotive partners as the second-largest US ride-hailing company tries to capitalize on missteps by Uber Technologies Inc.
Jaguar Land Rover said it is working with Lyft on autonomous-driving technology and would offer vehicles for rent to the San Francisco-based start-up’s drivers.
The automaker, which is a subsidiary of Tata Motors Ltd, also disclosed an investment of US$25 million in Lyft as part of a funding round that closed in April, valuing the business at US$7.5 billion.
The investment shows automakers are hedging their bets in the competitive ride-hailing market.
Tata Group, which owns Tata Motors and Jaguar, previously invested about US$100 million in Uber and they formed a financing partnership in India last year. General Motors Co, which is a major Lyft investor and partner, started working with Uber last year on car-sharing after rolling out a similar program with Lyft.
Lyft’s partnership with Jaguar comes on the heels of last month’s surprise announcement that the ride-hailing start-up is working with Alphabet Inc’s Waymo.
The Google sister company is suing Uber over self-driving car technology, even though Waymo’s parent company is an Uber investor.
In addition to Jaguar and Waymo, Lyft works with GM on autonomous driving projects and said last week that it struck a similar alliance with start-up NuTonomy.
“Different partners have different skill sets and this is such a big opportunity,” Lyft cofounder and president John Zimmer said. “Broadly speaking, it’s going to play out over the next five to 10 years, and it’s critical that we have multiple partners in various spaces and geographies.”
Uber has allies of its own.
The company has agreements with Daimler AG and Volvo Cars on autonomous technology. It is also spent hundreds of millions of US dollars on self-driving technology developed in-house, which is being tested with customers on public roads.
How self-driving cars are to be deployed in the coming decades is ill-defined.
Ride-hailing companies like Lyft, India’s Ola, China’s Didi Chuxing (滴滴出行) or Uber could one day buy their own autonomous vehicles, share profits with self-driving technology makers that operate cars on their networks or face competition from new autonomous ride-hailing systems.
For example, Tesla Inc’s Elon Musk has expressed interest in creating such a service for his customers.
“We think this is a really long game,” Zimmer said. “I used to run the mile. The mile is a four-lap race, and we might be in lap two.”
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day