Bye-Bye Personal Cars: Lyft President Says Personal Car Ownership Will Be A Thing Of The Past By 2025

San Francisco based Ride-hailing service Lyft's co-founder and President John Zimmer believes that self-driving cars will form the majority of all its rides within the next five years. Zimmer also added that personal car ownership will vanish as autonomous rides will offer a much cheaper way to travel than having to own an automobile.

In quite a long essay post on Medium titled "The Third Transportation Revolution: Lyft's Vision for the Next Ten Years and Beyond," Zimmer has articulated the future of transportation and also outlined his company's aim and vision for the next 10 years. In the coming five years a totally self-directed fleet of cars will offer most of the Lyft rides across the country, Zimmer wrote in the post. He also added that the starting versions of these autonomous vehicles are already working in San Francisco as well as Phoenix. Though Zimmer did not give details about how the company wants to achieve that in just a few years, he did outline phases when self-driving vehicles will progressively become more and more technically advanced.

By the end of 2017, he believes that semi-autonomous cars will already be available for Lyft users but with restrictions. By mid 2018, cars should be able to navigate on any route but again with a restriction of a speed of 25 miles per hour. By 2022, he predicts that Lyft will offer fully autonomous rides for its users.

Zimmer anticipates that personal ownership of cars is also going to be a thing of the past by the beginning of 2025, especially in the urban areas of United States as more people will opt for ride sharing on autonomous vehicles.

"Car ownership is a burden that costs an average American $9,000 each year.... Every year, more people are concluding that living without a car is more affordable. And when it comes to networked autonomous vehicles, most of the city-dwellers will definitely stop using a personal car," Zimmer wrote. His comments come in the midst of the commencement of multiple self-driving initiatives and enhancements in the autonomous driving technology. Uber's self-driving taxi  network has already begun offering rides to its first passengers inside Pittsburgh. Ford CEO Mark Fields had also earlier revealed that the company too plans to bring its own autonomous car in the market by 2025.

Lyft and General Motors had earlier this year formed a partnership so as to develop and enhance autonomous vehicles. GM invested a whopping $500m (£383m) for this collaboration in the ride-hailing company.