Life After Driving

New York Times Magazine:
"What the Car Did – and What it Might Do"

"Can Ford Turn Itself Into a Tech Company"

"The Rev-Up: Imagining a 20% Self-Driving World"

"Full Tilt: When 100% of Cars Are Autonomous"

Q (NYT Business Columnist Kevin Roose): You don’t think that there might be fewer Lyft drivers even 20 years from now?

A (Lyft Co-Founder and President John Zimmer): I think you’ll have way more. The cost of owning a car is $9,000 a year. Let’s say we offer a $500 monthly plan in which you can tap a button and get access to transportation whenever you want it, and you get to choose your room-on-wheels experience. Maybe you want a cup of coffee on your way to work, or you want to watch the Warriors game later, so you’re in what’s basically a sports bar, with a bartender. If 0.5 percent of all miles driven are done on a ride-sharing app, and then if that number increases to, say, 80 percent, it’ll be such a huge industry shift that even if only 2 percent of that 80 percent is done by human drivers, it still represents a drastic increase in the number of human ride-sharing drivers.