Ride-hailing app and Uber arch-rival Lyft just partnered with Jaguar Land Rover, landing itself an investment of £20m and a brand new fleet of cars, the Telegraph reports.
The backing comes through Jaguar Land Rover’s InMotion Ventures division, which was set up last year to invest in new transport technologies.
As well as giving the US firm Lyft a boost in car numbers, the new partnership will focus the £20m investment on driverless car technology – a service that Lyft’s nemesis Uber began testing on the streets in Pennsylvania last year.
Jaguar Land Rover has been testing autonomous vehicles on a 44-mile stretch near its Coventry headquarters, so its expertise should give Lyft a much-needed leg up in its efforts to knock Uber off the top spot.
Lyft recently got backing from Google’s autonomous car project, Waymo, and just last week locked down a deal with Nutonomy, a MIT tech startup company that makes software to build self-driving cars and autonomous mobile robots.
There’s still some work to be done if Lyft wants to steal Uber’s thunder, though. Lyft only caters to the US at the moment, while Uber has drivers around the globe. Thanks to Lyft’s new backers, however, it hopes to be active in around 300 cities by the end of this year.
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Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
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We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.