Lyft, a ride-hailing company, is trying to differentiate its offer from Uber. It has focussed at the business market trying to become the ride-hailing company for companies by striking agreement with several of them in their US market to carry their employees.
Last week it has included in the app you use to hail a ride the possibility to ask for a ride with an electric car as a way to ride the wave of environment conscious consumer. This falls in their business oriented strategy, since more and more companies are pressured to adopt an environment savvy approach. Hence, giving the option to hail an electric car goes in that direction.
At the same time this is stimulating “drivers” to shift to an electric car to get more ride requests.
Clearly, it is a tiny market and it is not going to have a strong impact. However, it is nice to see that some companies are starting to consider friendliness to the environment as a potential selling point. I am pretty sure that this is but one initiative that will be soon flanked by several others. All together they are likely to accelerate the shift from gasoline to electric transportation. Of course, this is not a silver bullet for a better environment. To get there we need a concurrent shift from fossil fuel to non-polluting ways of generating electricity, and a change in the distribution network (smarter grid). It won’t come in a day, nor in a year and it is not going to be cheap, but in the long term it is surely worth the effort.
Creating a culture for a CO2 free energy is a very important step. Kudos to Lyft!