Uber and Lyft Prep Driverless Taxis After Abandoning Effort

After abandoning driverless taxis, Uber and Lyft are reportedly reinvesting in the technology.

The two ride-hailing companies are working on plans to have driverless cars — provided by companies such as the Google-owned Waymo — on their apps this year, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported Monday (Jan. 6).

In the months ahead, Uber customers in Austin and Atlanta will be able to order rides via Waymo, per the report. Lyft has its own pilot in the works in Atlanta, working with May Mobility. Both companies will maintain these driverless fleets and are working on training workers to maintain the vehicles and seeking infrastructure to store and power them.

“This level of nitty-gritty, it takes years to build,” Andrew Macdonald, Uber’s senior vice president of mobility, told the WSJ. “It’s not something you can do by flipping a switch.”

The report notes that both companies are responding to signs that driverless technology could be about to blossom outside of a handful of “experimental markets.”

But while the rapid adoption of driverless cars has some gig drivers concerned, the WSJ says human-driven taxis won’t vanish right away.

And even then, the technology may not do well in densely populated markets such as New York City or under certain weather conditions, Robert Mollins, analyst at Gordon Haskett Research Advisors, told the WSJ.

“No one’s saying ‘let’s go send some of these cars to Boston in the middle of winter,’” he said. “What happens when all of these sensors get covered in snow?”

And as PYMNTS wrote last year, for robotaxis to be widely adopted, the payment process must be woven into ride-hailing, where users expect a frictionless, cashless payment system.

“It’s a new market. We do not have transactions right now inside cars. None of us are familiar with what it would even mean. Therefore, when we talk about launching a new category like in-vehicle payments, we have to make it as convenient as our existing payment methods,” Evgeny Klochikhin, founder and CEO at Sheeva.AI, told PYMNTS in an interview for the “AI Effect” series.

Meanwhile, PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster on Monday examined Uber from a different perspective — the company’s role as a logistics operation — in her forecast of trends that will affect the digital economy this year.

“The rise of ultra-efficient logistics will turn physical stores into relics for many product categories,” Webster wrote.

“As same-day delivery evolves into same-hour delivery, consumers will find fewer reasons to step into brick-and-mortar shops. We’re already seeing this trend in our data — globally, click-and-collect is losing its appeal, with shoppers opting for delivery or curbside pickup to avoid entering stores altogether.”