EVwire brief: Lyft partners with Tensor Auto for the Tensor's Robocar to become the first personally-owned autonomous vehicle to become "Lyft-ready" directly from the manufacturer, while Lyft, through its affiliates, has reserved hundreds of Tensor Robocars to purchase for its own fleet operations. Expected deliveries in late 2026. Tensor Auto recently unveiled its luxury robocar as the first AV “built for private ownership”
What is interesting here is that Lyft, with this, would take ownership of the cars itself for the first time in its current AV rollouts, kind of like Uber decided to acquire Lucid’s Nuro-equipped cars (as we reported here). This seems to be the first bet from Lyft on what they mapped out as “Phase three: the "Lyft-ready" network" back in March.
Also, to compare with Uber - Lucid deal, the Tensor robocars are in the luxury vehicle territory. However, it remains to be seen how $100k-$200k fleet-owned, or especially, personally owned vehicles will do in the robotaxi service.
Lyft writes in their press release (bold styling ours):
“Beyond enabling individual ownership, Lyft has reserved a fleet of hundreds of Robocars, and plans to work through its affiliates to purchase the vehicles for deployment across key markets in Europe and North America, subject to regulatory approvals.”
Who is Tensor Auto anyway?
The company seems to be a reborn version of the AutoX brand, a Chinese robotaxi player that was reported as shut down a few years ago, while now Tensor is emerging in the US as a spin-off of it. Tensor received California’s second-ever driverless testing permit in 2020 but still lacks approval for commercial passenger service without safety drivers.
Tensor claims that over the next few years, Tensor Robocars, equipped with an NVIDIA-powered onboard supercomputer, will roll out L4 driving capabilities across Europe, the Middle East, and the United States
Source: Lyft
