Just like many other companies, Lyft has recently expressed their interest in self-driving cars, with plans to develop their own fleet in the future. Clearly with self-driving cars, the need for an actual human driver is no longer there, or is there? According to Lyft’s director of product, Taggart Matthiesen, there is.Speaking in the latest episode of Recode Decode, Matthiesen stated that there will be pretty much always a need for human drivers. “Drivers have always been part of our family, they have been core to our service. As far as I’m concerned, they will continue to be that.” He claims that even if they’re not necessarily driving, they can help to provide other services.
For example, “If I need to go to the doctor’s office and my leg is in a cast and I can’t drive, we have a service for that. If you get into the world of autonomous, we may need someone in that vehicle to help that person. There are things we’re doing beyond getting a passenger from point A to point B, additional services that we as a company can look at.”
That being said, we expect that it will probably be a while before we start seeing autonomous cars become a mainstay on roads. The technology is still being worked on as we speak, not to mention there are also various regulations and laws that need to be addressed before it becomes road legal.
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