Lyft Expects Most Autonomous Car Rides Within Five Years

Lyft CEO John Zimmer expects his shift to largely switch to self-driving cars within five years. The Uber competitor assumes that the transition will not go through owners of these types of vehicles who rent out their cars to others.

Zimmer says he takes a different stance than Elon Musk, who expects the rental model to catch on. However, Lyft sees the future in a model based on a fleet of self-driving vehicles, which users can use on the basis of different subscriptions. The traditional ownership of a car would therefore disappear completely within a period of about ten years, Zimmer expects. The rental model is flawed, he says, because owners prefer not to rent their cars to strangers and because the service cannot be offered on a large scale.

The Lyft founder also states that the transition to fully autonomous vehicles will not happen overnight. He therefore distinguishes three phases, in which we are currently in the first. The second phase consists of limited autonomous cars that perform certain tasks in addition to human-driven vehicles. In it, autonomous vehicles will only be allowed to drive under strict restrictions. For example, in a certain type of weather and at low speeds. The Lyft vehicles would also have these limitations, but could take on more and more trips over time. The third phase consists of the introduction of fully autonomous cars in about ten years’ time.

In addition, Zimmer expects the introduction of self-driving cars to initially increase the number of drivers, rather than decreasing them. That would be because many people will give up their cars, creating more demand for drivers. Initially, this demand could only partly be met by autonomous vehicles.

Lyft received a $500 million investment from General Motors in January to build a network of autonomous vehicles. Competitor Uber showed a first photo of a self-driving car in the city of Pittsburgh in May. Shortly afterwards, users could actually order the cars.