Lyft exec: Even with self-driving cars, 'we will always need drivers'
- "We will always need drivers," Raj Kapoor, chief strategy officer at Lyft, told CNBC.
- When autonomous vehicle saturation peaks, U.S. drivers could see job losses at a rate of 25,000 a month, or 300,000 a year, according to a report from Goldman Sachs Economics Research.
Anita Balakrishnan | @MsABalakrishnan
16 Hours Ago
Ride-sharing company Lyft has announced plans to move deeper into self-driving technology — but that does not put the company at odds with its fleet of drivers, according to one top executive.
"We will always need drivers," Raj Kapoor, chief strategy officer at Lyft, told CNBC's " Squawk Box" on Monday. He also said that Lyft's big driver network is an advantage over other companies such as Tesla who are also working on self driving cars.
"What the consumer cares about the most is having a reliable experience, in addition to safety and that means that when I open up the app, I know that there's a car there in a couple minutes," Kapoor said. "For that kind of ubiquity, you need to have human drivers. We have over 700,000 drivers now. That's something that any other company would have to replicate instantly."
more text and video interview at cnbc.com |
