Toyota Acquires Lyft, Want To Build An Autonomous Taxi?

Illustrate taxi ottoman (while Lyft)

JAKARTA - After Uber released its autonomous car development unit, Lyft. Now the autonomous car development division has reportedly been acquired by Woven Planet, a subsidiary of Toyota Mobil.

The acquisition cost US $ 550 million. Taking the costs of Lyft's self-driving development, and partnering with Woven Planet, will allow the Japanese subsidiary to use the Lyft platform to commercialize and manage future robotaxi services.

Quoting Tech Crunch, this acquisition will allow 300 employees from Lyft to be integrated into Woven Planet. The Level 5 team itself is an autonomous car development division based outside Palo Alto, California.

"This transaction will not only allow Lyft to focus on advancing our leading Autonomous platform and transportation network, this partnership will help draw on our profitability timeline," said Lyft founder and president John Zimmer in a statement.

The deal, if closed for the planned timeframe or the third quarter of 2021, would put the company on a better path to profitability.

The transaction will also remove expensive annual fees from Lyft's budget. The ride-hailing company said that by dismantling Level 5, it hoped to remove $ 100 million from its annual non-GAAP operating costs on a net basis.

Of course this partnership is very important for Lyft and Uber, as both have seen ride-sharing services suffer during the pandemic.

In fact, Lyft already has partnerships with AV developers, most notably the $ 4 billion Hyundai-Aptiv joint venture known as Motional, as well as Waymo. The goal is to lock in the rest. Meanwhile, with Woven Planet, Lyft signed a commercial agreement to use the Lyft platform and fleet data.