The Lyft car rental program is aimed at potential drivers who lack suitable vehicles.
GM has teamed up with the popular ride-sharing company Lyft for a program designed to provide would-be drivers the keys to success.
Dubbed Express Drive, the new partnership provides Lyft drivers with access to rental cars for $99 a week and 20 cents a mile. The move is meant to allow prospective Lyft drivers who don’t own a Lyft-ready car to participate. (Lyft cars must have four doors and be no older than a 2004 model.) Double Express Drive is scheduled to kick off in Chicago and spread to Boston, Baltimore and Washington, D.C. Lyft hopes the concept keeps it competitive with Uber in attracting and retaining driving talent. Uber has rolled out a similar partnership with Enterprise Rent-a-Car in Denver.
The Lyft-GM partnership was announced shortly after GM invested $500 million in the ride-hailing company’s $1 billion Series F funding round. Express Drive is meant to help Lyft attract and retain driving talent by providing qualified applicants a way to secure suitable vehicles without having to go to a great expense. Current Lyft drivers may also access the rentals at no cost as long as they provide a certain number of rides a week. If 40 or more rides are given, the 20-cent mileage fee is waived as well.
GM and Lyft’s Express Drive partnership falls under the company’s recently announced “Maven” program. That car-sharing program was announced in January 2016 as a “personal mobility brand.” Maven boasts several innovative concepts under its umbrella, including resident and peer-to-peer car sharing. Maven essentially allows customers to reserve and unlock vehicles for short-term use via smartphone.
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While automobile ownership isn’t likely to go away anytime soon, a new survey released by American Public Transportation indicates that reliance on personal cars should decline as ride-hailing services such as Lyft and Uber gain ground. The survey focused on 4,500 ride-sharing users in markets such as Boston, Los Angeles and Seattle. As the trend in ride-sharing use continues to grow, automotive companies are preparing for a future where car ownership is less common or necessary.
“GM is creating an ecosystem around ride-sharing,” Kelley Blue Book analyst Akshay Anand explained to the Los Angeles Times. Ride-sharing, Anand said, is likely to remain a supplement to car ownership and not an outright replacement in the near future. Even so, automakers see the trend as a new revenue stream and “a big part of the future of mobility.”
How soon Express Drive will kick off in Chicago remains unclear. Lyft estimates it has turned down more than 150,000 people nationwide as drivers simply because their vehicles disqualified them. That number bodes well for the potential demand Express Drive may see in usage.
