Rangers’ Gallo took a Lyft, but there’s a catch to this ride
Joey Gallo is from Las Vegas and continues to live there in the off-season.
As might be expected, the Texas Rangers’ slugger apparently likes to gamble. But not the kind that can get him banned from baseball.
Gallo, along with Chicago Cubs third baseman and fellow Vegasite Kris Bryant, on Jan. 9 went for a ride down the Las Vegas Strip in a self-driving Lyft.
Emphasis on the “self-driving.”
That’s right: A key piece for the 2018 Rangers cruised down one of the busiest streets in the country in a car that was driven by no one.
Shouldn’t there be a clause in his contract that prevents that?
“It was a pretty wild thing,” Gallo said Friday. “It’s a little scary at first. After a couple minutes, you kind of forget that it’s driving itself, honestly.”
To be fair, the test ride courtesy of Lyft and the company that provides the technology, Aptiv, didn’t come without someone in the driver’s seat. Gallo said that a man from Aptiv sat behind the wheel for his and Bryant’s ride, but only took control of the car when navigating the various lanes at the Wynn Casino.
Other than that, all the man did was push the “auto” button. And the ride, which Gallo estimated to be around 7 to 10 minutes each way, was a clean one.
With one exception.
“There was one where we were going and a car came out of no where and pulled in front of us,” Gallo said. “It takes a little longer to read because, obviously, it doesn’t have the vision that a human has, so it was kind of slowing down slowly, slowly, slowly. At the end it slowed down. Even that that was with us was like, ‘OK, that was a little close.”
Gallo said that he and Bryant were told that the self-driving cars still have multiple kinks to work out, so don’t expect to see them regularly any time soon. The test rides were part of the annual International Consumer Electronics Show, which ended last week.
Jeff Wilson: 817-390-7760, @JeffWilson_FWST
This story was originally published January 18, 2018 at 2:38 PM with the headline "Rangers’ Gallo took a Lyft, but there’s a catch to this ride."