Can Lyft Exec Comments Do Heavy Lifting?

Lyft is all over news reports with its President's statements that:

2021 - Majority of Lyft rides will be in driverless vehicles

2025 - The end of the age of privately owned and human driven vehicles

But there's more. As if this guy can read my mind, the Lyft President and co-founder John Zimmer is talking about all sorts of driverless vehicles (scroll down in the article). Now I was curious, you know, what with my driverless tiny house fantasy.

The entire rant is available

Here is the entirety of Zimmer's rant. Called The Road Ahead, this is worthwhile reading. In addition to what has been widely reported, Zimmer goes into the Mobility as a Service (MaaS) model (he calls it Transportation as a Service). He also talks about saving money by ditching the car instead of the costly maintenance of such a "ball and chain." Completely on my wavelength. He also thinks we will have a mixed network of regular and driverless vehicles, with the tipping point to driverless at around 2025, much sooner than conventional predictions. Again, I'm with Zimmer on this. 

Zimmer goes into his expected trajectory of the shift to driverless. Cute charts. He espouses the complete New Urbanist dream of the car-free life. He basically does not see anywhere beyond the borders of the five boroughs, San Fransisco, Boston, Portland, and, you get it, the other obvious suspects.

Open questions

Hello - but plenty of people live in the suburbs, in car-dependent small cities, and in, yes, rural areas. Not a peep about those. One question is whether this driverless MaaS will take hold in those places. I say yes for small cities and some suburbs, but probably not profitable for rural areas and exurbs. 

Another question is whether there is enough cash to keep Lyft in business until 2025. Certainly its partnership with GM helped - to the tune of $500 million. But recent reports ponder Lyft's ability to hang on and its attempts to be acquired. Jury is definitely out on that. Perhaps the rant is related.