Ride-hailing app Lyft said most of its rides will be in self-driving cars within five years.
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Lyft President and co-founder John Zimmer released a 14-page document today in which he predicts that by 2021, “a majority” of rides on its network will be in autonomous vehicles.
It’s likely the ride-hailing companies would own the self-driving cars, which would cut their biggest expense, payments to drivers.
Lyft’s main competitor Uber made headlines last week when it began running autonomous vehicle tests on roads in Pittsburgh.
Lyft partnered earlier this year with General Motors, signing an agreement under which the automotive giant will invest $500 million in the ride-hailing company with a view to create an autonomous vehicle network.
Zimmer believes that ride-hailing companies like his own and Uber are now “empowering” people to give up their cars. Musk’s model will not scale because individual auto owners won’t want to rent their cars to strangers, Zimmer wrote.
He states that people will choose to use rented autonomous cars mainly due the cost of running a auto in the USA – average is $9,000 a year.
When that happens, a lot of parking space used by cars will be freed for wider sidewalks, parks and new housing, because the average vehicle is used only 4 percent of the time and parked for the other 96 percent. In an interview, Zimmer painted a fantastical vision of the future, in which driverless cars suddenly become de facto offices and nightclubs.
The key to all of this, though, is having a network of driverless cars that can adequately replace owning a auto.
Drivers may not have to worry about their jobs, even as autonomous cars improve and start driving themselves. Zimmer thinks a majority of Lyft’s rides won’t need drivers within 5 years and all of them will ditch humans within 10. “As more people trade their keys for Lyft, the overall market will grow dramatically”.
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That will likely be unwelcome news to those who now make their living driving for ridesharing services, but Lyft’s John Zimmer insists that this upcoming shift will, in fact, create more jobs, at least at first.
