How Detroit is reinventing itself for a driverless age

To recap the Detroit company’s busy January: GM announced a partnership with and $500 million investment in ride-sharing service Lyft, including plans to provide Lyft with a fleet of driverless cars. (Lyft is Uber’s main competitor in the on-the call driver business.) GM also acquired the discontinued ride-share service Sidecar. And it unveiled its electric car, Bolt, with a battery capable of powering through 200 miles.

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Most recently, GM launched car-sharing service Maven in Ann Arbor, Michigan. For the uninitiated, car-sharing involves picking up a car at a designated location and driving it yourself (Zipcar and Car2Go may be the most well-known examples). With Maven, customers can locate and reserve cars at one of 21 locations around Ann Arbor using an app, and unlock the vehicle and control the heating and cooling system through their smartphones. The Maven fleet also will be compatible with Apple CarPlay, Android Auto, and Sirius XM. Though limited to Ann Arbor for now, GM plans to expand the service soon to Chicago and New York City…

To be clear, Ford, GM, and others are far from throwing away the traditional single owner-driver model that has long formed the foundation of the automotive industry. But they have joined “a long list of companies you would and wouldn’t think of [that] are reserving their slice of the now-inevitable world where cars don’t need humans and can come to us with the press of a button,” writes David Pierce in Wired.

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