Toyota’s subsidiary Woven Planet will acquire the division of taxi platform Lyft, which is working on level 5 autonomous driving. Self-driving Toyotas are thus a step closer.
Lyft has been working on technology for fully self-driving cars for about four years. First GM presented itself as a large party to work on this together with Lyft, then Jaguar Land Rover and Ford followed. In the end, however, it remained a relatively modest project, which nevertheless generated a lot of knowledge. Apparently enough for Toyota to take over.
Woven Planet, a Silicon Valley-based new subsidiary of Toyota that will primarily focus on technology innovation in the IT field, will acquire Lyft’s autonomous arm for € 456 million. The takeover should be completed this year. Woven Planet will not only have access to the technology, knowledge and personnel associated with the project, but also vehicle data from Lyft.
Concrete goals for Toyota are not yet attached. The CEO of Woven Planet, Luc Vincent, states that this is an important step in ‘the mission to prepare our technology for the smart cities of the future’. You can bet that there will be self-driving Toyotas at some point in the future, which we owe a great deal to this deal.