(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- Raj Kapoor thinks autonomous vehicles will save the Earth. With some caveats. “The big idea is actually making sure that we have all four together: autonomous, electric, shared rides with shared ownership,” explains the chief strategy officer at Lyft Inc. “Climate change is probably one of the world’s biggest challenges,” because one person acting alone can’t really make a difference. “Policy alone can’t change it. Technology alone can’t change it. So I felt like I had to do something.”
Last year, Lyft set an aggressive goal to provide at least 1 billion rides per year by 2025 in self-driving electric vehicles. Consumer-owned cars, Kapoor says, spend most of their time parked, whereas a shared vehicle could almost always be in use. Electric engines have 20 moving parts, vs. many hundreds in gas-powered ones, so they require less maintenance. Thanks to the diminished cost of upkeep, cheaper fuel, and lack of operators, driverless EV rides should be cheap enough that the average person could take one every day, providing a key link between public transit and your front door.
Kapoor made his name in Silicon Valley founding and later selling Snapfish, a photo-sharing service, to Hewlett-Packard for an estimated $300 million in 2005, but he’s long been interested in cars. In the 1970s and ’80s his father engineered superhighways in Pennsylvania, and in the early 1990s, Kapoor worked on an early autonomous vehicle as a Carnegie Mellon undergraduate. In 2011 he joined the board of Lyft. “He’s very meticulous,” says Paul Twohey, who co-founded the workout startup Fitmob with Kapoor in 2013. “When we had to change paths, he was egoless—he’d just say, ‘What do we have to do for the business?’ ”
After Twohey and Kapoor merged Fitmob with ClassPass, another fitness-facilitating startup, in 2015, Kapoor began studying urbanization. Reducing carbon emissions will hinge on designing cities with efficient transportation—a massive business opportunity. Kapoor considered starting an investment fund focused on urban development, but he ultimately came back to Lyft and its potential to influence urban behavior. He wanted to work there, he told founders Logan Green and John Zimmer, but only if he could focus on environmentally responsible expansion. They accepted.
Kapoor’s work is cut out for him as he guides the company’s transition from a gig-economy model to a mostly driverless EV fleet. Lyft has teamed up with Ford Motor Co., Waymo LLC, and a few self-driving startups to develop technology, but the company is far from profitable and will have to build infrastructure to support a fleet. Kapoor is optimistic. “I went to my 9-year-old’s third-grade class to talk about transportation, and none of them had any desire to get a license,” he says. “They all want self-driving vehicles, especially if they could watch Netflix and play video games.”
To contact the author of this story: Arianne Cohen in New York at arianne@gmail.com.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Jillian Goodman at jgoodman74@bloomberg.net.
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