ADI Communications & CCTV UK News: Most of Lyft cars will be autonomous in just 5 years and private car ownership will all but end by 2025

Monday, 19 September 2016

Most of Lyft cars will be autonomous in just 5 years and private car ownership will all but end by 2025

We have built our communities entirely around cars. And for the most part, we’ve built them for cars that aren’t even moving. The average vehicle is used only 4% of the time and parked the other 96%.

Lyft’s Vision for the Next Ten Years and Beyond is provided by Lyft co-founder John Zimmer at Medium.com.

Imagine for a minute, what our world could look like if we found a way to take most of these cars off the road. It would be a world with less traffic and less pollution. It could be a world built around people and not cars.

The coming revolution will be defined by three key shifts:

1. Autonomous vehicle fleets will quickly become widespread and will account for the majority of Lyft rides within 5 years.
Last January, Lyft announced a partnership with General Motors to launch an on-demand network of autonomous vehicles. If you live in San Francisco or Phoenix, you may have seen these cars on the road, and within five years a fully autonomous fleet of cars will provide the majority of Lyft rides across the country.

Elon is right that a network of vehicles is critical, but the transition to an autonomous future will not occur primarily through individually owned cars. It will be both more practical and appealing to access autonomous vehicles when they are part of Lyft’s networked fleet.

2. By 2025, private car ownership will all-but end in major U.S. cities.

As a country, we’ve long celebrated cars as symbols of freedom and identity. But for many people — especially millennials — this doesn’t ring true. We see car ownership as a burden that is costing the average American $9,000 every year. The car has actually become more like a $9,000 ball and chain that gets dragged through our daily life. Owning a car means monthly car payments, searching for parking, buying fuel, and dealing with repairs.