Lyft Co-Founder Says Americans Will Not Drive Personal Cars In Cities In 2025

According to Zimmer, Americans living in towns will not own private vehicles by 2025, as they would prefer to ride in driverless automobiles. His prediction sounds overly optimistic, but there are some points in his post on Medium that we would like to stress to our readers, as they have caught our attention.

John Zimmer says that he feels that people live in cities designed for cars, and not the other way around. He also says that the average vehicle is only used about four percent of the time of ownership, while the rest it stays parked.

This clogs up cities, and also harms the lives of those residing in the space, as more parking spaces are needed for vehicles that just "wait" around for their owners.

Technically, this is correct, but it is part of the Western concept of private ownership. When nobody owns cars, but anyone could use an automobile, the idea starts to sound like a utopia related to communism.

For most of us, Zimmer does make a point. If you have a job that implies working in an office, or in a defined space, your car will only be used to get you there and will stay parked until the day’s work is completed.

In his forecast, Lyft's president says people would prefer to have an autonomous car drive them to work, and then leave to pick up another customer.

Once the user’s schedule would be complete, another driverless car could be hailed, and then take the client wherever they want, just like they would have in a regular automobile.

The same prediction mentions ditching human drivers from Lyft by 2025, as people would not have personal cars anymore. On the other hand, this presumed gap in ownership would go to the companies that would operate driverless services, which might not be as ready to spend millions of dollars on cars used as taxis by the rest of the residents of a city.

While the future envisioned by Zimmer might be possible some day, we do not think that the American society can be changed in such a dramatic way in just nine years.

It would be too risky for car companies, which are just preparing themselves for driverless vehicles, and companies like Uber and Lyft might not be that ready to pay for a complete overhaul of their fleet in the form of autonomous cars instead of human drivers.