Trips in self-driving vehicles are coming to the Bay Area soon courtesy of a partnership between ride-hailing service Lyft and Mountain View startup Drive.ai, which makes kits to turn regular cars into autonomous ones.

“Drive.ai and Lyft together will bring self-driving vehicles to the Bay Area,” said Carol Reiley, Drive.ai co-founder and president. For Lyft riders, the experience will resemble a typical ride, she said. The robot taxis will have Drive.ai safety drivers at the wheel.

“A Bay Area person would call a ride, get a notification saying they’d been selected and can opt in for a free autonomous ride,” Reiley said. “If they accept that, our autonomous vehicle would pick them up. From the app side, it would look relatively the same, but they would have a special experience with the autonomous car.”

Lyft and Drive.ai wouldn’t give details on when or exactly where the pilot will occur, other than “soon” and “in the Bay Area.” Reiley said the rides would occur in geofenced areas where the autonomous cars were familiar with the streets.

For both companies, a key point “is to figure out how people perceive and interact with autonomous vehicles from the outside world,” Reiley said. “We want people in the car to feel very safe, to have a pleasant experience and to be delighted. We want the ride to feel seamless.”

Drive.ai has licenses for six autonomous cars and 12 safety drivers, according to the California Department of Motor Vehicles, which regulates self-driving car tests in the state. Reiley said it is adding a self-driving vehicle every two weeks or so, and that its DMV licenses cover its Lyft pilot.

However, the California Public Utilities Commission, which regulates Lyft, had a different understanding of the Lyft-Drive.ai partnership than that stated by the companies. “The service would need to be regulated by the (commission) if it were made available to members of the general public rather than just (Drive.ai) employees,” for example, through a ride-hailing app, commission spokeswoman Terrie Prosper said in an email.

A test involving picking up Lyft passengers would require a permit from the commission, Prosper said.

Lyft said, “We will run the pilot within the bounds of all applicable regulations.”

Started in 2015 by Reiley and engineers from Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence Lab, Drive.ai received $50 million in venture funding in late June, bringing its total backing to $62 million. Its focus is on self-driving kits for large commercial fleets.

Reiley said Drive.ai and Lyft have been in talks for a while, and she sees their partnership as a natural fit. “There’s an obvious value proposition with autonomous vehicles (and ride-hailing), both for more low-cost rides and for unique autonomous vehicle experiences,” she said.

Like other autonomous cars, Drive.ai’s vehicles bristle with rooftop sensors. In addition, they sport a digital rooftop sign that can display words and icons to communicate with other drivers and pedestrians. On a recent test drive in a blue Lincoln MKZ, it kept the sign off, on the premise that the cars are already distracting for other drivers, according to Tory Smith, a Drive.ai technical program manager. Reiley said it will use four-door sedans in the Lyft trial, without specifying the makes and models.

Both Lyft and ride-hailing rival Uber see autonomous cars as the future of their industry.

Uber has been testing robot taxis with passengers in Pittsburgh and Phoenix. It also tests the cars in San Francisco but no longer picks up passengers here, after a brief period in December, which ended when state regulators pulled the plug on that program. Uber has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to develop the technology — including its purchase of startup Otto, which led to a lawsuit from Waymo alleging theft of intellectual property, which is still pending.

Lyft has taken a two-pronged approach. It positions its ride-hailing service as “an open platform” for self-driving car providers to dispatch their vehicles with passengers using the Lyft app. Lyft previously announced a deal with Massachusetts startup NuTonomy to provide robot taxi rides in Boston sometime this year. General Motors, an investor in Lyft, has said it will deploy thousands of self-driving Chevy Bolts with Lyft next year. Lyft also has self-driving deals with Waymo and Jaguar Land Rover, but hasn’t provided any details.

In addition, Lyft recently said it would develop its own self-driving technology at a new lab in Palo Alto called Level 5, after the designation for cars that can drive themselves in all circumstances. While it expects to employ hundreds of engineers by the end of next year, Lyft does not plan to make its own cars, but instead “create a self-driving system we can partner with the auto industry to bring to life,” Raj Kapoor, chief strategy officer, said at a press event in July.

Carolyn Said is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: csaid@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @csaid