Lyft Inc. is ramping up its autonomous vehicle operation going into 2020.

Luc Vincent, the executive who heads the program, detailed in a blog post today that the company is establishing a new self-driving car testing facility in East Palo Alto, California.

The hub will feature a “reconfigurable” track designed to simulate a real road. There will intersections, merges, traffic lights and other infrastructure that will enable Lyft to train its vehicles’ artificial intelligence in a variety of driving situations.

Another benefit the facility will provide is proximity. Nearby Palo Alto is home to Lyft’s main self-driving car development center and the testing hub will be more accessible for the engineers who work there than the current track the company uses, which is located 60 miles north in the city of Concord. “The close proximity will allow us to increase the number of tests we run,” Vincent wrote.

The ride-hailing provider’s autonomous test fleet currently covers four times as many miles per quarter than six months ago and continues to grow rapidly. Lyft is increasing not only the number of vehicles it has in operation, but also their variety. Vincent revealed in today’s blog post that the Ford Fusion hybrid sedans which make up the backbone of the autonomous fleet will soon have company.  

“We started building our next generation autonomous vehicles (AVs) using Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid Minivans,” the executive wrote. “The minivan’s size and functionality provide our team with significant flexibility to experiment with the self-driving rideshare experience.” 

Those are presumably the same considerations that led Waymo LLC to standardize much of its own autonomous driving efforts on the vehicle. Last year, the Alphabet Inc. subsidiary inked a mammoth contract with Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV for up to 62,000 Chrysler Pacificas. Waymo has also ordered up to 20,000 I-Pace electric crossover SUVs from Jaguar Land Rover Automatic PLC.

The relationship between Lyft and Waymo is not purely competitive in nature. Though the companies are developing separate autonomous driving stacks, they struck a partnership in 2017 to make the Alphabet subsidiary’s vehicles accessible via the Lyft app. The integration went live earlier this year in Phoenix, Arizona with an initial fleet of 10 cars.

Photo: Lyft