Lyft is a peer to peer driving company that is to Uber what Apple used to be to Microsoft--it's all about community and an informal service compared to Uber's brand as more business like and 'professional'.
Lyft's Co-Founder, John Zimmer, has gone on record to claim that within 5 years a majority of its vehicles will be self-driving. He went on to claim, according to Associated Press (AP) that "personal car ownership will come to an end because autonomous rides will become a cheaper way to travel than owning an automobile." His forecast is that by 2025, there will be no personal ownership of automobiles--2025. Zimmer calls this the "Third Transportation Revolution," in which he envisages people purchasing vehicles with milage limits on them, like mobile phones--but doesn't that sound like a lease agreement today? Well, it's a bit more like Netflix than leasing that Toyota. As self-driving cars 'evolve' into fleets, the model for transportation will be more likened to a subscription with a number of different options. Here's Zimmer from his paper The Third Transportation Revolution:
This service will be more flexible than owning a car, giving you access to all the transportation you need. Don’t drive very often? Use a pay-as-you-go plan for a few cents every mile you ride. Take a road trip every weekend? Buy the unlimited mileage plan. Going out every Saturday? Get the premium package with upgraded vehicles. The point is, you won’t be stuck with one car and limited options. Through a fleet of autonomous cars, you’ll have better transportation choices than ever before with a plan that works for you.
Indeed, Zimmer's vision is very similar philosophically to Uber CEO Travis Kalanick's: There are too many cars that are sitting idle in our urban spaces taking up precious landscape that could be used for parks. By shifting to a fleet of self-driving vehicles, we'll have fewer cars on the roads, fewer roads in our environment, and more parks to enjoy. These business models are all promoted under the guise of a call back to nature. Instead of individual cars, you'll have fleets of Lyft or Uber or Tesla or Apple or Mercedes or Google or whatever else vehicles.
To me it sounds like more of the same. I've written before about CEOs becoming social planners and social engineers--and John Zimmer is another example. One question to ask is to what extent fleets of self-driving vehicles will indeed reduce the number of vehicles on the roads. If all these companies are in competition with one another, and we continue to have exploding population growth, will these highly competitive disruptive rogue-agent CEOs suddenly choose to lose marketshare and revenue and shareholder interest out of a trumped up love for the earth? I don't think so.
The only thing these models seem to hold out for the public is less freedom of mobility and ownership. Is it somehow morally wrong to own a vehicle? And to what extent is the CEO of a for-profit company in any position to foist his or her morality on you? This kind of sales job simply creates the problem, then provides the solution--not unlike deodorant.
And who will control mobility in this Uber-Lyft revolution? Whose interests will mobility serve? Yes, of course you pay money to own and operate a vechicle--but you have a choice to go where you want when you want at any time you want. Your money buys you freedom. What happens if you need to get out of dodge in the face of a catastrophe? What happens if the Uber-Lyft revolution has all its vehicles on some kind of emergency function that shuts them down or has them transported automatically to some place you don't want to go? Sounds fantastical? Perhaps. But these scenarios are plausible, especially when human mobility is controlled. As well, I get skittish whenever someone tells me what I can and can't own--as if owning DVDs and Record Players and automobiles is a bad thing. What next, home ownership?
What is really driving John Zimmer's report is Uber's Kalanick and Tesla's Elon Musk and the Google transformation agents, and the whole group of tech-giants all competing for market share and control over the next transportation revolution. It's profit--not nature--driven. To me, if Zimmer were really so concerned about getting rid of automobiles, then he would be doing something else, like using a horse-drawn wagon to harvest crop on an acreage somewhere.
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