What it's like to ride in a self driving Lyft
0What it's like to ride in a self-driving Lyft.
Riding in a self-driving Lyft car is way more boring than you'd expect. But that's really the point.
The ride, which I took on the streets of Las Vegas at the outset of CES 2018, was only remarkable in how mundane it was. Turns, lane changes, braking for red lights, accelerating for green — it was all pretty much the same as if a human were doing the driving. Well, if it weren't for the display on the dash showing a LiDAR-constructed view of the streets around us, and the robotic female voice that would occasionally chime in with a "lane change checking" or some other status update.
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And this is why the self-driving experience Lyft showed off — developed by its platform partner, Aptiv (formerly Delphi) — is so impressive: The drive felt just like an attentive chauffeur. The driving style was very focused on the passenger, certainly: There were no sudden accelerations to make a stale green light or catch up to traffic, for example.