Lyft gets $500 million from General Motors and joins the race for the first consumer-ready self-driving car system.

Lyft is valued at $5.5 billion due to financing from GM, Saudi Arabia’s Kingdom Holding CO., Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten Inc. and Janus Capital Management.

This is the first time a large automaker joins forces with a ride-sharing company. Considering that they are a huge threat to auto sales, as more and more urban commuters prefer to hail a ride from Uber or Lyft rather than owning a car, an alliance doesn’t seem so shocking.

With Google, Uber, Tesla and Apple heading towards autonomous vehicles, the industry is trying to adapt and reshape itself.

General Motors have announced that it would work closely with Lyft on developing a self-driving car system that would let customers order a vehicle via their smartphone, tablet or personal computer, and have said car arrive at their door step with no driver.

General Motors President Dan Ammann has said in an interview that the very first large-scale deployment of self-driving cars will be in demand on ride-sharing platforms – as in Uber and Lyft.

GM is known to have already started developing autonomous cars, and that it plans on testing a fleet of vehicles at their Detroit technical center in 2016, but there’s no news regarding on the phase of development with Lyft. Ammann has declined to comment on the status.

The fleet of vehicles will be comprised of 2017 Chevrolet Volts.

Also, GM has confirmed that their Super Cruise tech, which has been in development since 2012, will be finally available in the 2017 version of the Cadillac CT6.

In the following months, the car-manufacturer giant plans to build a series of rental-car centeres where Lyft drivers have the possibility of renting vehicles at lower, discounted prices.

Lyft had previously managed to raise about $1 billion from investors across the world including hedge-fund behemoth Carl Icahn, Middle Kingdom-based ride-hailing company Didi Kuaidi Joint Co., Tencent Holding Ltd., Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., US-located Founders Fund, Coatue Management and Andreessen Horowitz.

After receiving funds from Carl Icahn, back in May of 2015, Lyft was valued at $2.5 billion.

Even though that seems to be quite huge, its direct competitor, Uber, has raised a total of about $12 billion both in equity and debt.

Uber Technologies have also managed to raise, roughly, the same funds as Uber, but the Cali-based ride-sharing company is valued at $64.6 billion – higher than even GM’s market value, which stands at $53 billion.

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