Collaboration to Make Tensor Robocar the First Consumer AV to Seamlessly Deploy on Lyft, Right Off the Lot; Partnership Includes Planned Purchase of Fleet of Tensor Vehicles for Network Expansion

Lyft, a global mobility platform, and Tensor, a pioneer in personal autonomous vehicles, today announced a planned strategic partnership that will revolutionize how consumers access and monetize autonomous driving technology. Through this collaboration, Tensor's groundbreaking Robocar will become the first personally-owned autonomous vehicle (AV) 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.

Founded in Silicon Valley in 2016, Tensor has distinguished itself as the first company to develop a Level 4 AV designed for personal ownership. With over nine years of AV development and California's second-ever driverless testing permit for passenger vehicles, Tensor recently unveiled the world's first personal Robocar — a new-generation AV built from the ground up for private ownership. 

The Tensor Robocar is powered by NVIDIA technology, not only for its sophisticated AI onboard and unparalleled approach to safety through high-redundant systems, but also for the large-scale training and simulation for the Tensor Foundation Models. Since 2018, Tensor has collaborated with NVIDIA to accelerate each generation of its autonomy platforms with NVIDIA’s advanced technology.

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 – starting with major metropolitan areas. Lyft and Tensor plan to complete an integration that will allow for Tensor Robocars to immediately onboard on Lyft’s platform and let owners have instant access to monetize their vehicles in markets where “Lyft-ready” L4 technology is available. 

The planned partnership represents an important milestone in AV adoption, creating a pathway for individual consumers to seamlessly deploy their personal AV on a rideshare network – allowing for better utilization of their vehicles and immediate return on their investment. The upcoming collaboration furthers Lyft's comprehensive approach to AVs — from technology integration and fleet management to individual ownership opportunities — positioning the company as the leading AV platform for both consumers and fleet operators.

"Lyft has created opportunities for millions of people to earn on the platform, but right now, one of the last barriers to rideshare is time — you have to physically be in your vehicle to give rides and earn," said Jeremy Bird, Executive Vice President of Driver Experience at Lyft. "What's exciting about Tensor is they're advancing the opportunity that Lyft already creates, removing that final obstacle while reinforcing our vision of a hybrid transportation future. Future owners will be able to start earning on the Lyft network the moment their vehicle rolls off the lot, while riders get access to some of the most advanced and luxurious AVs on the road. This is exactly the kind of innovation that expands what's possible in transportation."

"At Tensor, our mission of ‘Own Your Autonomy’ is about empowering you to take control of your mobility,” said Hugo Fozzati, Chief Business Officer at Tensor. “Through our upcoming partnership with Lyft, we’re taking a bold step forward — expanding our premium autonomous experience to a wider audience of Lyft passengers and enabling you to make your car work for you. By allowing your Tensor to operate as a vehicle on the Lyft platform when you’re not using it, you can effortlessly generate revenue. This marks a new chapter in luxury autonomous mobility — placing control in your hands and redefining the future of autonomous travel."

“The collaboration between Tensor and Lyft represents a bold step toward an AI-driven transportation future, enabled by NVIDIA’s end-to-end automotive platform,” said Rishi Dhall, Vice President of Automotive at NVIDIA. “From large-scale training on NVIDIA DGX to in-vehicle real-time inference on NVIDIA DRIVE AGX Thor, Tensor is building an AI system that continuously learns and improves, setting a new benchmark for performance, safety, and intelligence in autonomous mobility.”

This “Lyft-ready” approach is more than a technical integration — it's a fundamental shift in how people think about vehicle ownership. Traditional car ownership means a vehicle loses value as it sits idle most of the time. Tensor Robocars flip this model, turning personal luxury vehicles into productive assets that can generate income around the clock. Beyond platform access, Lyft envisions AV owners will also over time benefit from Lyft’s fleet management subsidiary Flexdrive's comprehensive suite of services — keeping vehicles clean, charged, and professionally maintained to ensure they're always ready to generate revenue. This would create new opportunities for vehicle owners to maximize their investment returns, while establishing a framework that demonstrates how "Lyft-ready" technology could transform vehicle economics as autonomous capabilities become more widespread. The result is a new category of vehicle ownership that doesn't require people to sacrifice their time or change their daily routines.

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. This dual approach serves multiple objectives, including accelerating the availability of state-of-the-art L4 AVs to Lyft riders and generating operational insights that will benefit the broader "Lyft-ready" ecosystem. The Tensor Robocars will enable Lyft to offer a differentiated premium autonomous transportation experience, setting a new standard for comfort, privacy, and sophistication in autonomous mobility. It is designed from the ground up for operation-light Level 4 autonomy with self-reliant capabilities including autonomous sensor cleaning, parking, charging, and maintenance. For Lyft, such technology is attractive as it has the potential to minimize downtime and grow revenue-generating commercial deployment hours.

Engineered for unmatched safety, privacy, and autonomy, the Tensor Robocar features L4 autonomous technology with over 100 cutting-edge sensors (including 37 cameras, 5 lidars, 11 radars) with an agentic AI architecture. It streams and processes over 53 gigabits of sensor data per second — roughly 1,000 times faster than typical home internet — all within a single Robocar, delivering the speed and intelligence needed to perceive and respond to the world in real time. To reason over such a huge amount of sensor inputs into the large AI models, Tensor has the world’s most powerful automotive supercomputer, with over 8,000 TOPS of GPU computing capability. Equipped with eight NVIDIA DRIVE AGX Thor SoCs based on the cutting-edge Blackwell GPU architecture, this in-vehicle supercomputer sets a new benchmark for the industry.

Tensor’s foundation model for autonomous driving is entirely data-driven, learning every aspect of driving — including perception, prediction, and planning — from vast amounts of real-world and simulated data. NVIDIA’s AI architecture for training and in-vehicle inference enables Tensor’s complete development pipeline of embodied AI systems, from training, validation, to deployment. 

Its transformer-based AI models with a Mixture of Experts (MoE) architecture are trained on data collected by expert drivers to capture ideal driving behavior with advanced imitation learning, as well as large vision language models to help navigate unexpected “corner cases,” all powered by NVIDIA DGX platform. Large-scale simulations powered by NVIDIA GPUs are deployed for training and validation with advanced world models, supporting rigorous safety evaluation before vehicles hit the road.

Tensor’s Robocars are scheduled for delivery by the end of 2026, launching in select global markets across the U.S., Europe, and the UAE. In select markets where the Lyft app and Tensor’s L4 capabilities are available, vehicles will be “Lyft-ready” via the integrated software in the vehicle. Lyft is preparing the necessary infrastructure and technology, with the goal to launch the first “Lyft-ready” market in 2027.

Whether it’s an everyday commute or a journey that changes everything, Lyft is driven by our purpose: to serve and connect. Founded in 2012, Lyft has grown into a global mobility platform offering a mix of rideshare, taxis, private hire vehicles, car sharing, bikes, and scooters across 4 continents and nearly 1,000 cities. Millions of drivers have chosen to earn on billions of rides - helping to create a more connected world, with transportation options for everyone.

Tensor is an American AI company dedicated to building agentic products that empower individual consumers. Our flagship product, the Tensor Robocar, is the world's first personal Robocar and the first AI agentic vehicle—fully autonomous, automotive-grade, and built for private ownership at scale. Founded in 2016 in Silicon Valley, Tensor is headquartered in San Jose, California, with offices in Barcelona, Singapore, and Dubai. Tensor obtained its first self-driving test permit in Feb 2017 in California and started testing on public roads in California. In 2019, Tensor obtained California‘s second CPUC test permit for testing RoboTaxi for the general public. In 2020, Tensor obtained California's second driverless permit for passenger vehicles.

Flexdrive, Lyft’s fleet management subsidiary, leverages proprietary software built specifically for high-mileage rideshare fleet operations, with real-time vehicle tracking, proactive maintenance alerts, geofencing technology for rapid service response, and intelligent charge management to minimize downtime. With over eight years managing 15,000 vehicles across dozens of North American locations, Flexdrive brings unique vertically integrated expertise enabled by deep technical investment in rideshare-focused fleet management software.

Certain statements contained in this announcement are “forward-looking statements” about Lyft within the meaning of the securities laws, including statements about Lyft’s autonomous vehicle strategy and planned partnership with Tensor and related plans, expectations, technologies, benefits for vehicle owners and riders and purchase of Tensor vehicles by Lyft through its affiliates. Such statements, which are not of historical fact, involve estimates, assumptions, judgments and uncertainties. There are a number of factors that could cause actual results or outcomes to differ materially from those addressed in the forward-looking statements. Such factors are detailed in Lyft’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Lyft does not undertake an obligation to update its forward-looking statements to reflect future events, except as required by applicable law.