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Season 5 — Smarter Cars Podcast
Mid-Season Recap of Interviews
We’re midway through Season 5 of the podcast. In case you missed any episodes, here’s a quick peek at the interviews so far:
Jody Kelman Director of Product Management, Lyft’s Self-Driving Platform
We discuss Lyft’s two-pronged approach to autonomous vehicles. Lyft has partnerships with Aptiv in Las Vegas and Waymo in Arizona, where partner vehicles are made available with safety drivers on Lyft’s platform as an option riders can choose. And Lyft is also building its own autonomous driving system through its division called Level 5.
Jody discusses why Lyft is pursuing both strategies simultaneously, noting it is part of Lyft’s ethos of working collaboratively to move forward in all directions.
“I think of this as as probably the most difficult problem that my generation has had to solve, and we simply don’t believe anyone is going to be able to solve this by going it alone. So it is going to be this kind of very heavy, three-way collaboration between regulators in cities, industry players and then consumers, who are also very much a part of this adoption story.”
Jody notes that the partnerships in Las Vegas and Arizona are designed to learn how self-driving cars…
