Lyft has set itself some concrete goals for its renewed commitment to the Paris climate agreement, in spite of Trump’s announcement that the U.S. as a nation would be pulling out of the accord. Those goals focus primarily on Lyft’s autonomous ambitions, and so are contingent on the ride hailing company accomplishing its self-driving vision at scale, but they’re laudable goals nonetheless.
The targets Lyft has set include powering 100 percent of the autonomous electric vehicles using its platform in the future from 100 percent renewable energy – starting from day one, which means beginning with the couple of cars Lyft is fielding in partnership with Nutonomy on Boston streets starting a little later on this year. Lyft announced that it would be running some Renault Zoe electric cars outfitted with Nutonomy’s autonomous vehicle tech earlier this month.
Lyft is also seeking to provide at minimum 1 billion rides per year via electric autonomous vehicles by 2025. That’s a tall order, given that Lyft provided 160 million rides in 2016, the company revealed at the beginning of this year. A minimum of 1 billion rides in 2025, solely from autonomous electric vehicles, envisions dramatic, sustained, year-over-year growth between now and then.
Finally, Lyft says it will reduce CO2 emissions across the U.S. transportation sector by at minimum 5 million tons annually by 2025, which sounds like a reasonable result provided it manages to achieve the above ride numbers.
These are all goals that seem to rely heavily on Lyft making good on its plans to combine autonomous and electrification trends with a wide range of automaker and self-driving company partnerships to maximize its reach. It’ll also require driverless tech to continue to develop, to accelerate its advent and to be received smoothly by regulators, all of which seem like optimistic goals. Eight years can seem like a long time in some contexts, but as a timeframe for a change this dramatic, it seems like no time at all.
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