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⚡ This Week’s Big Charge
🚗 Lyft Exec Jeremy Bird On Standing Out In An Autonomous Future
We often forget how remarkable it is that, in much of the world, you can tap your phone and a driver just shows up to take you anywhere. Companies like Uber and Lyft certainly have their controversies, from labor disputes to traffic concerns. But they’re also everyday tech miracles millions rely on for mobility.
Yet the “driver” part of my sentence above almost feels quaint when Waymo can’t go a week without announcing it’s bringing autonomous taxis to another city.
Human drivers aren’t disappearing anytime soon, and widespread full autonomy is still probably decades off. But 2025 proved the tech is real and advancing quickly. So how does a ride-hailing network adapt, especially against a much bigger global rival?
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I caught up with Jeremy Bird, former politico turned Executive Vice President of Global Growth at Lyft, to hear more about how the company—still far behind Uber in revenue, scale and valuation—aims to navigate the AV era.
“We’re completely embracing it,” Bird said. “I think we have done the hard work of defining the hybrid strategy that needs to shape our future, [and] also building those partnerships and relationships that we think are critical.”
That means no longer trying to develop that technology in-house. And it means that someday, “drivers” could be the ones owning the AVs that ferry riders for Lyft.
“We want to do what we do best, which is to be the marketplace,” Bird said. “We want to operate the network, and we want to be asset-light as much as possible.”
🛻 The State Of Play At Lyft:
Lyft primarily operates in North America but is expanding more in Europe. It’s often compared to Uber, which is much more global and does about four times more rides daily.
Like Uber and General Motors in the 2010s AV 1.0 boom, Lyft once had its own, in-house autonomous vehicle division. But it proved to be capital-intensive with unclear returns.
Lyft later sold that operation to Toyota’s Woven technology arm. It signed on with Argo AI, but that company shuttered in 2021. Another partnership with Hyundai joint venture Motional to deploy AV taxis at scale hit pause last year.
After the industry’s decade of false starts, things are different with AVs in 2025, Bird said.
“It feels like it really has kind of started to bust open,” he said. “The speed at which other people will be able to develop safe and reliable and affordable AV technology is going to be, I think, mind-blowing in the next decade or so.”
And by “other people,” Bird means the companies Lyft is already teaming with right now.