Major Western ride-hailing platforms like Uber and Lyft sketched a gradual path towards introducing self-driving cars at this week's Web Summit in Lisbon, with infrastructure, developing regulation and passengers' preference for human contact weighing on the brakes.

Building autonomous vehicles many times safer than human drivers is "almost largely solved", Uber's operations chief Andrew Macdonald told Web Summit attendees on Tuesday.

"Now what you have is a commercialisation question."

"In five years, if (autonomous driving) achieves even ten percent of our business, that would be enormously successful," Lyft chief David Risher told AFP in a Wednesday interview.

In today's terms, that would represent around $500 million of the just under $5 billion of gross bookings Lyft reported in i

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