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Lyft's CEO lays down future vision of self driving cars

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It was expected, sooner or later. Given that Uber has just rolled out self-driving test cars in Pittsburgh, it had become incumbent on its arch rival in the US, Lyft to speak on the matter and where does it sees itself amidst all recent developments.

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So, Lyft President, John Zimmer released a 14-page document on Medium yesterday titled “The Third Transportation Revolution: Lyft’s Vision for the Next Ten Years and Beyond” in which he predicts that by 2021, "a majority" of rides on its network will be in autonomous vehicles. Zimmer also says that in next ten years, personal car ownership in US cities will be a thing of the past.

Zimmer, through his post gives a sneak peek into Lyft’s plans about autonomous vehicles. According to him, it will be a three phase development, the first of which will likely be available by 2017. In that phase, semi-autonomous cars will be made available to Lyft users to drive along fixed routes that the technology is guaranteed to be able to navigate.

These cars will navigate more than just the fixed routes, in the second phase but will only drive up to 25 miles per hour. As the technology advances and the software encounters more complex environments, Zimmer wrote, cars will get faster.

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How Lyft sees human driver demand increasing with near-term autonomous advancements. Credit: Lyft.

In the last phase, all Lyft rides will be fully autonomous. Not just this, this third phase will be followed by car ownership witnessing a steep fall. Zimmer, who has long been a vocal proponent of ending car ownership, also sets a date for the death of the personally owned car in major U.S. cities: 2025.

Zimmer, however does admit that there are still a lot of details to work out, such as who would own this fleet of driverless vehicles if there are no drivers, what happens to drivers in a post-driver world, and how state and federal government can slow or speed this process up.

He also dismissed public demonstrations of self-driving technology by his competitors as "marketing stunts," and revealed that Lyft, along with it’s partner General Motors, is already testing autonomous vehicles in San Francisco and Arizona, but said he wasn’t ready to commit to a date for public trials quite yet.

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Ooeho HtKsxyDpPp F HwQ How Lyft sees human driver demand increasing with near-term autonomous advancements.

Zimmer then writes about Elon Musk’s ‘Master Plan’ where he envisions a future in which a network of individual owned Teslas can be rented out on-demand as needed, driving revenue for the vehicle owner themselves.

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"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," Zimmer writes in the essay. "It will be both more practical and appealing to access autonomous vehicles when they are part of Lyft’s networked fleet."

Zimmer’s commentary on Musk’s model basically comes down to consistency and quality of experience, cleanliness and maintenance, all of which are easier to guarantee when a fleet is centrally managed.

Though, Zimmer’s treatise may look well timed amidst recent pilots from Uber and nuTonomy, his meaningful intentions cannot be doubted. He says, “There are a lot of marketing stunts happening where you put a few cars on the road, or you make announcements and press releases, but the thing that nobody’s talking about is you have this once-every-hundred-year opportunity to – if we work with the right stakeholders – to actually impact how our cities work.”

“Most of us have grown up in cities built around the automobile, but 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. A world where we need less parking — where streets can be narrowed and sidewalks widened. It’s a world where we can construct new housing and small businesses on parking lots across the country – or turn them into green spaces and parks,” continues Zimmer. “That’s a world built around people, not cars.”