Lyft strove to kill car ownership. Now it wants to take advantage of it

Lyft customers know it as the bright pink app to tap when they need a car ride or want to rent a bike or scooter. Today the company announced that it wants to be the place to take care of your own car. The Lyft app provides a way to find and reserve parking in 16 cities, call for roadside assistance, and schedule vehicle maintenance.

Adding those new services is a small step for an app, but part of a much larger shift in ride-hailing. As Lyft and its larger competitor Uber search for a way to finally generate profits, some of the visions they once held for the future have been modified, if not left aside. Lyft once pushed for an end to personal car ownership. Now it is gambling that will continue and even provide a new source of income. About 75 percent of users own a car. “We meet our riders and customers where they are,” said Jody Kelman, the company’s fleet chief.

Here’s how far Lyft has come: In 2016, co-founder John Zimmer posted a cri de coeur of sorts to Medium about the then four-year-old startup mission called “The Third Transportation Revolution.” Zimmer admitted, yes, he loves cars and has been since he was a kid. But during an urban planning course in college, he realized that America’s cities were dominated by the car, and not in a good way. The next time you go out, he wrote, “look how much land is devoted to cars – and nothing else.” Empty and underused vehicles fill parking lots and lanes, forcing bicycles and scooters and pedestrians to crowd the sidewalks. “America has a failing transportation business,” he concluded — and Lyft would turn it around.

Lyft’s main tool in driving that revolution was autonomous vehicles. Zimmer then predicted that by the middle of the next decade (that’s two years from today), robotaxis would account for the majority of Lyft rides. He reckoned that between conventional Lyft rides and autonomous rides, private car ownership would be “virtually ended” in major US cities by 2025. Even as Lyft and Uber operated in the gray areas of government transportation regulations, they both pledged to remake city dwellers. relationships with transport and the built environment. A city without private cars, Zimmer wrote, could be rebuilt with wider sidewalks and parks instead of parking lots.

But growing up can be painful. In recent years, Lyft and Uber have had to get to grips with, well, the transportation industry. As it turns out, it’s really hard to make money from rides; neither has yet made any real gains. Lyft’s stock price is down more than 80 percent since it went public in 2019. This month, the company laid off 13 percent of its workforce due to economic headwinds.

Uber’s pursuit of diversification included investments in food and grocery delivery. Lyft is trying to find its own ways to keep riders on its app. The rollout of car services, in partnership with SpotHero for parking, roadside assistance provider Agero and Goodyear service centers, is part of a renewal of the Lyft Pink subscription program. At $9.99 a month, it gives users discounts on ride-hailing, priority pickups, a handful of free bike and scooter rides, and now four free roadside assistance services a year and a 15 percent break on car maintenance services. Lyft declined to share how many people subscribe to Lyft Pink.

The broader transportation technology landscape also looks different. Automakers are skeptical about the near-term viability of robotaxi technology. Uber sold its self-driving vehicle tech unit in 2020, and Lyft did the same a few months later. A partnership with autonomous vehicle technology company Motional means some self-driving vehicle prototypes are appearing on the Lyft app in Las Vegas. Lyft announced today that the same robotaxi will be available in Los Angeles for years to come. But overall, autonomous vehicle development seems to have stalled, and Zimmer is no longer sticking to his prediction that robotaxis would soon provide a “majority of Lyft rides.” In October, he told a tech conference that he didn’t think Lyft would replace human drivers with robots “at any point in the next decade.”

Now Lyft has flipped from killing personal cars to helping owners maintain them. And there’s some logic to switching teams: The number of personal cars in the populous cities where Lyft is most popular has actually increased over the past decade. In places where public transportation is a viable way to get around, the pandemic made this even worse, as fears of the virus pushed people who could afford it off trains and buses and into car dealerships. In the summer of 2020, there were 18 percent more new car registrations in New York City than the same period the year before.

“What I have realized is that the opportunity is there Reduce personal car ownership” rather than eliminating it, says Kelman, Lyft’s fleet chief. Perhaps a household can function with one car instead of two. As she tells it, Lyft has literally grown up. “Our founders entered the family phase of life as we run this company,” she says. “Having looked at how we can continue to evolve to support our riders improve their lives with the world’s best transportation, we really have to say, ‘We’d love to be there for you when you have two kids and you have to park downtown for a doctor’s appointment.’”

Kelman says Lyft still wants to change the world, but its vision now seems a bit more like the status quo. The company once dreamed of helping destroy parking lots; now you can reserve a spot through the app.