Lyft is scrambling to compete as Uber racks up autonomous vehicle (AV) partners. On Monday, Lyft said it partnered with Japanese conglomerate Marubeni to bring robotaxis to Dallas roads as soon as next year before expanding to "thousands of vehicles" in other cities. It's the first fruit from Lyft's Mobileye partnership, announced in November. TechCrunch notes that the Intel-owned Mobileye's tech is already available in models from (among others) Audi, Ford, GM, Nissan and Volkswagen. Lyft hasn't yet said which automaker(s) it's partnering with for the Dallas rollout.

I joined the strategy team and worked on bizdev so I learned a lot about acceptability and usage and patterns and how do you actually deploy these vehicles at scale from the fleet management perspective. Interestingly, with Maven, I also had the chance to rent cars to Uber and Lyft drivers with a program called Express Drive. That gave me a deep understanding of the unit economics of how hard it is for the gig economy worker to actually get the flexibility -- it's a pretty hard job and they have to work a lot of hours to make a lower minimum wage. It gave me an appreciation for what it takes to deploy a fleet at scale. It comes down to how do you improve utilization?