- Hey everybody this is Sean with The Verge.
We're at CES 2018 and I'm about to do, what else?
Ride in a self-driving car.
Now self-driving cars, they're at CES every year,
but this demo is gonna be different.
This is not just a self-driving rider on a parking lot
or around a convention center.
This is the result of a partnership between Lyft
and a company called Aptiv.
What they're gonna do is actually offer,
semi-autonomous car rides to people here at CES,
to one of 20 or more destinations across the week.
So people who are attending the show can actually
sign up and just in the Lyft app,
hail a self-driving car,
and take it to one of these destinations.
And we're about to get a preview
of what that whole experience looks like.
(upbeat music)
So we just hopped in the car.
Tap confirm.
It's showing us our route.
- [Man] We're going to Caesars Palace.
- Smooth and simple, yeah we're gonna go to Caesars Palace.
I didn't bring any cash with me.
(laughs)
Oh and I get to start route.
I didn't know that there was gonna be so much control.
Alright.
The driver is actually driving right now,
because there's regulations that say that they
can't do it on private property here.
One of the biggest challenges in Las Vegas
with self-driving cars is that it doesn't have the same
kind of lane lines that most roads have in America.
It has these things called box dots,
which are little sequences of dots on the roads
that separate the lanes.
And that's a bit of a challenge for self-driving systems
which usually need lane markers to be able to know
where the lanes are,
- [Female Voice] Autonomous driving.
- There we go!
And now we're in autonomous driving mode,
according to the loud computer voice behind my head.
(upbeat music)
So it's going well so far.
We stopped beautifully at a red light.
And some passengers crossed in front with no problems,
and now we're going again.
It's very smooth so far.
Like many self-driving demos it's a little bit,
boring if you forget about the technology in that,
that's a little loud and not boring.
It is giving us a lot of information about what's going on.
Whether it's here on this screen,
in the back seat or in the screen in the front seat,
showing basically that the car knows what it's doing.
And trying to constantly prove that the car knows
what it's doing to the people who are inside of it.
The car we're in is BMW 5 Series,
and the tech that's powering it is basically all the tech
that this company Aptiv has provided.
They've been working on self-driving technology
in a few different models.
This is just the one that they have here.
Aptive was a good choice for Lyft because they've been here
in different forms over the last couple of years at CES,
doing rides, demo rides, in self-driving cars.
So they have a lot of data about the challenging
environment in Las Vegas.
In past experiences usually you feel some drifting
left and right in a lane as the car tries to sort of keep
itself planted in the right position.
There is none of that which is good,
because that kind of stuff,
those little margins of error,
can make motion sickness come up in people,
and when you're Lyft and you're a company
that's trying to offer rides to people
who are going out or back from a night on a town
and you're wobbling them back and forth,
that's probably a bad idea.
Another thing that can really challenge some of these
systems is harsh lighting,
especially when there aren't solid lane lines.
And we got a lot of light and shadow
and cars braking in front of us,
and it's reading the scene pretty well.
At least to the point that I'm not noticing
the car reading it wrong.
Look, this guy actually has to talk to his taxi driver.
Hey! The taxi's driver is giving the thumbs up.
I don't think he's too worried about self-driving technology
taking over his job.
- [Female Voice] Lane change checking.
- Oh man.
- [Female Voice] Changing lane.
- It's amazing how much a car like this makes you realize,
all the terrible and terrifying things
that are happening around you.
That car that was sort of like hanging
off the edge of a curve,
is he gonna pull out?
He's not even paying attention to the road,
like that car that just crossed in front of us.
It makes you so much more self-aware,
of how much danger we're constantly near
when we're driving or riding in a car.
So that's it, that completes our ride
in a self-driving Lyft.
We got to Caesar's Palace and back without losing any money,
which is a pretty good fee in Las Vegas,
also no crashes!
For more self-driving cars, weird, self-flying helicopters,
and flying cars and all that stuff from CES 2018,
make sure you go to youtube.com/theverge.
Click subscribe and theverge.com/CES.
That's where everything is.
Thanks for watching.