Lyft Patent Puts Self-Driving Cars to the Test
Despite the steep competition and roadblocks, the company has high hopes for expanding its self-driving services.

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As Lyft continues to build out its autonomous vision, the company wants to make sure its cars aren’t going haywire.
The rideshare service is seeking to patent a system for “autonomous vehicle performance evaluation.” Lyft’s tech essentially calculates the efficiency and reliability of an autonomous vehicle in real time when choosing between human drivers and self-driving cars.
The patent offers an evaluation system other than “miles per intervention,” or “the average number of miles traveled by one or more autonomous vehicles before a driver or autonomy system disengages,” the company said. “MPI has a weak and inconsistent correlation with actual performance.”
Lyft uses a number of different benchmarks to determine the performance metrics of an autonomous vehicle in any given ride request. For one, the system may look at pickup location and distance traveled to determine the “utility metric” of sending a self-driving car, considering things like local restrictions and previous rides in the area.
Another primary metric is “disengagement.” This refers to incidents when a car’s self-driving feature turned off, and whether those situations had a negative outcome. Negative outcomes could range from collisions or near-collisions to simply “elegance violation,” in which the vehicle “would have violated a comfort and/or elegance rule if the driver had not intervened.”
Finally, it may also determine the comfort level of the riders themselves with autonomous driving — for example, based on whether or not they’ve taken autonomous rides previously. All of these calculations help ensure Lyft is only sending autonomous vehicles into situations they’re best suited for.
Autonomous vehicle companies have been busy lately. Tesla held its long-awaited robotaxi event, called “We, Robot,” earlier this month, unveiling its two-seater robotaxi product called the Cybercab and its larger vehicle, called the Robovan, which can accommodate up to 20 people.
Google’s self-driving division Waymo has also quickly gained speed, hitting 100,000 weekly paid rides last month, according to Bloomberg Technology. And Uber, Lyft’s biggest competitor, announced in late August that it would begin offering autonomous vehicle rides on its platform in partnership with Cruise.
Lyft has been working toward autonomous vehicle integrations for years, though it’s faced a bit of a rocky road in the space. The company partnered with Ford-owned Argo AI in 2021 for self-driving rides in Miami and Austin, but shut down the offering in late 2022 after the startup ceased operations. Lyft also partnered with self-driving car firm Motional in 2022 for rides in Las Vegas, but the startup halted the partnership in May to focus on restructuring.
Despite the competition and roadblocks, Lyft CEO David Risher said in August that he still expects autonomous vehicles to be a “huge tailwind for rideshare because it’s gonna add more supply… certainly a safer supply over time and hopefully also a less expensive supply.”