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Conference · 2026-09-10
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Well, it's my pleasure to start our next Fireside Chat with the team from Lyft. David, thanks so much for being part of the conference this year. Okay. To start us off, I think what we want to do is the mobility offering continues to evolve. You've been on a big journey, and what you offer consumers today is very different than what you were offering two or three years ago as the product and the platform continue to change. Talk a little bit about that. Before we get into all the current state and the future state of the company, Talk a little bit about some of the imprint of change you put on the company through platform and product changes.
Yeah, for sure. So it's true. So I guess I've been in the chair just about three and a half years now. Best thing in the world, most fun I've ever had in any job. And let's look back for a couple of years just to sort of maybe set the context. So three years ago when I started, you know, gosh, I think we were doing about 700 million rides a year. We were not gap profitable at the time. I think we were generating a couple hundred million dollars in EBITDA, and we were consuming cash. I think we were burning about $300 million of cash, $250 million three years ago in 2023. So now where are we? Okay, so now this year we're going to do over a billion rides, which is absolutely wonderful, and we'll come back to that a whole bunch of different times. Of course, we're generating cash to the tune of about a billion dollars a year. We're EBITDA profitable, of course, to the tune of maybe $700 million. By the way, this math comes from just look at Q2 and annualize it. Just multiply it by four and do that kind of comparison. and we'll generate maybe $300 million or $700 million in EBITDA, and, of course, we'll be GAAP profitable. So that is a huge, huge difference, and I have to pause right now for one second. This is not your question, but I cannot move beyond looking at Erin Brewer here. I have done this, of course, as CEO, but I've had an incredible partner in crime the whole time, Erin Brewer. Erin just announced yesterday she is going to retire towards the end of this year, and I just want to spend a second to give her a huge, huge round of applause. Every single person. If there's any good news, and there's only one piece of good news, that's sitting right next to us, Michael Brous. Michael Brous is the guy who took our lust business from not so good to fantastic. He's a finance guy. He's a strategic guy. He's an operator. He's exactly the right guy to take us forward. So let's talk a little bit about the future, where we're going now, right? So I think there are three dimensions to sort of look at. I think you can look at, here's how we talk about it. Lyft is going to grow up. We're going to grow out. And we're going to grow forward. What does that mean? Think about each one of those. Up means up more towards luxury. So if you look at the last couple of years, one of the real sort of macro trends I think you can see is an enormous interest in higher value items. And you see this sometimes on the economy side. It's called the K-shaped economy. If you talk to people in airlines, you say they're making all their money at the front of the plane. We will do some of the same. We have a whole set of luxury offerings. Of course, we acquired a company called TBR that really sets the standard up at the top on the chauffeur side. So we should talk about that. And we've already made great progress throughout the last couple of years. So that's up. Now, out. What does that mean? That means overseas. So about a year ago, we acquired FreeNow. That acquisition has been an incredible, frankly, game-changer for us because it's allowed us to think as a truly global company. I'm sure we'll come back to that. But there's a lot more to come there. That doubles our TAMP, right? I mean, roughly the size of Europe is the size of the United States. A huge, huge amount of opportunity there. And then Ford, of course, is into the AV future. And this will be a locomotive. This will be an absolute, a massive, massive tailwind for us. And the question is, how do we make the most of that?
And we're going to talk about all of those. And I'll hope that Erin will miss me asking her about capital allocation, which I think happened every 90 days for the last couple of years. So let's start with the consumer. You have a read into the consumer. That's been a debate point here at the conference over the last couple of days. What are you seeing about the health of the consumer? You referenced in your first answer a little bit about the K-shaped economy. Talk a little bit about just what you're seeing from the consumer backdrop.
So I'll tell you something interesting here. And I think this is maybe, this might be a little bit of a shift in sort of at least my narrative. You know, I am not sure that rideshare any longer is going to be the best read on the consumer, and here's why. We're all reading about the stress that consumers are under, right? And it's real. That's not something to take lightly. But if I look at our business, what do I see? I'll look at last week, for example. Last week was an all-time high for rides in the company's history, all-time high for rides. It was also an all-time high for driver hours in the company's history, right? We've been around for 14 years and two weeks. We are reaching all-time highs now. Okay, what this suggests to me is that we are embedded in people's lives in a very, very deep way. This is no longer discretionary spending. I think if you ask about consumer health, you often want to look at discretionary spending, right, because you're looking for tradeoffs that people are making where they feel like they have a choice. For many people, Lyft is the way they get to work every morning. By the way, our commute is at all-time highs as well. It's the way they get to the grocery store. Grocery store visits have gone up by 15%. It's the way they live their daily lives. It's no longer a question. Now, interestingly enough, we're also seeing all-time high in party hours. And you can also read the media about this, the sort of, let's say, attraction, I think almost magnetic attraction of in-real-life experiences, NFL games or concerts, whatever it is. So I actually think, you know, as much as I'd like to be able to tell you all about the consumer through our lens, if I only look through our lens, I would say the consumer is very happy, you know, up and down the spectrum.
When you turn the focus to your core business in North America, you've seen strong growth trends in North America year to date. Talk a little bit about the building blocks that have produced that type of growth and how you think about trying to maintain and build on that momentum as we get deeper into the year.
Yeah. Okay. So I'm going to zoom out for a second. You asked about growth. I'm going to start with a total co-perspective just to sort of level set a second and then zoom back into North America. Okay. So on a total co-perspective, if you look at growth rates of H1 and H2, and this I would expect a lot of ears to perk up at this point because you tend to look very careful at these things, you're going to see pretty similar numbers in terms of growth rate on a total co-perspective. Okay. Why would that be? Well, let's break it down. Let's go global, then let's go to your question in North America. Globally, we acquired Freenow about a year ago. That means in the first half, every ride was incremental. Every ride was incremental. Whereas the second half will lap Freenow acquisition. That means that not every ride will be incremental. Okay. So if total growth is roughly similar H1 to H2, and now you just heard what I said about what's happening overseas, let's look at the U.S. In the U.S., quarter after quarter after quarter after quarter, we've seen accelerating growth, accelerating growth. And we expect that that will be the case through the back half of the year as well. Okay, so now to your question. What are the drivers? This is one of those very interesting businesses. We call it a business of inches. It's not one thing. It starts with our very stubborn focus on our strategy, which is customer obsession drives profitable growth. That's where you see the innovation. So first, let's talk about the basics. We're picking you up faster than ever. In fact, if I can brag for a second about the team, 78% of the time right now would pick you up faster than or as fast as our bigger competitor. So that's a big deal. Our pricing is competitive. Our ETAs are fast. Our cancellation rates are low. Basics, right? But you have to do that 24-7. Then on top of that, you've got a whole set of customer-focused innovations. You might think of them as demographic innovations. Things like Lifting, which has grown some crazy percentage over the last couple of months, or Liftsilver for older people. Then you might look at it geographically. Where are we sort of overachieving geographically? Well, there are areas which we call low-scale markets. That's where a lot of the TAM is in North America. And we've got very, very strong double-digit growth in these lower-scale markets. You look at Canada, another geographic cut, where we're doubling roughly year on year. Just huge, huge growth in Canada. So that's amazing as well. And then the last piece of this kind of growth engine, which has all these different kind of pistons all kind of plugging along, is around our partnerships. Our partnerships now, and here I'm talking about the DoorDashes, the United, the Built, The Hilton, the Alaskans, the Chasers. Each one of those in their own way, and we can talk about them individually if you're interested, but collectively they account for about 30% of our ride volume. That's up to 20% a couple of years ago. And in every one of those cases, those are strong drivers either of acquisition or retention. So it's really kind of an all-the-above strategy, but I think we're doing a really nice job executing on all these dimensions.
Okay. So that's the global picture and that's the North America picture. Let's just double click down on international, because you've acquired, and now you're talking about going into a further array of markets over time as well and extending your own brand deeper into European markets. Talk about the international opportunity set and what you've done from a capital allocation standpoint to date that sets you up to execute on that strategy.
So as I said, I mean, the big change, and it really was sort of a step change within the company, is the acquisition of FreeNow about a year ago. You know, it costs $200 million or so. It's about a billion dollars of booking. so significant, but not, you know, sort of mind-blowingly big from a financial perspective, but very significantly operationally, because what it allowed us to do is say, let's take our U.S. systems and start to globalize. Let's really start to make sure that these systems that were built for North America can work around the world. Okay, what's the evidence that we're on track, and then where are we going to be? The evidence that we're on track is we are actually ahead of schedule at unifying the app experience. So even today, right now, if you're friends and family of Lyft, if you're in Europe, in In fact, my brother, it's literally friends and family. My brother just sent me something back on this this morning. If you're in Paris or in London or, you know, in Barcelona, all across Europe, you can open up the Lyft app if you're friends and family and, you know, get a ride. What does that mean? That means that certainly by this time next year, the 300-plus million people who live in Western Europe will have a new first-tier customer-obsessed rideshare option. Again, it doubles our TAM, and there's this huge, huge upside because we've got great technology we've been working on for 14 years, and we can really bring that into Europe. So that's one thing it means. Another thing it means, and by the way, we're actually ahead of schedule on that, which is a whole separate interesting AI story. Second thing it means is that, so today, 390 airplanes will take off from American soil and will land in European soil, 390. And that's a sort of typical number for this time of year. Every one of those will have 300 people on them and every one of those people need to arrive when they get to the airport. That today has basically been unavailable to us as a market. And that's a large number. I mean, do the math. It's 30, 40 million arrivals every single year over the course of a year. That is an enormous thing. So this time next year and before, Europe will have a first-class ride share system that they don't have today that brings new capabilities and customer obsession and will be much more open to the travel market, which is, by the way, a double win for us because it turns out that sometimes when people go to Europe, they switch over to the other guys, and when we come back to the United States, they forget to switch back to the better option, which is us. So there's some leakage there that we can kind of plug. So that's kind of the big picture there. Very, very significant opportunity for us.
You talked earlier about the push into premium and repositioning yourself there. Talk about what you need to get right on both the supply side and the demand side to scale the premium offering over time. Because there's obviously a higher bar for what those types of customers expect for the price points that typically sit in that part of the market.
100%. and I'll tell you a funny story. So I was talking to one of our drivers last year about exactly this topic, and I said, what do people who are taking black cars expect? And he said, they expect everything. Like, they expect the cars in front of me to part, right? So that I can actually kind of speed up and get to the airport. So, yeah, you're absolutely right. So, okay, let's talk about luxury. Luxury, as you know, just talk about economics for a second. It's very attractive. The price point is high. That drives booking. The margins are high, not just because the price is higher, but because, remember, professional drivers, and these are professional drivers, carry their own insurance. So that's very, very important to us. And then it has all sorts of interesting access to a whole customer set that's very difficult to get to if you don't have a great high-end offering. We've been working on this for quarter after quarter. I think, I forget the exact numbers, but I think we grew maybe 60%, 70%. Very, very significant. It's actually black SUV and other premium offerings in our rideshare portfolio are our fastest-growing, we call them internal modes. So anyway, really, really good start there. And it's not just by accident. So you asked about supply and demand. On the supply side, 18 months ago, maybe one in three drivers was a professional driver. Now we're up to about one in two, and sooner it'll be the vast majority will be a professional driver with the better economics and the better service and so forth and so on. That's ride-shared luxury, and that is a space where, frankly, we're underpenetrated for historical reasons. We've got a lot of headroom, particularly if you compare us to the other guys. Then on top of that, last year we bought a company called TBR. TBR is a chauffeur. So now we're talking about the luxury space has some stridations in it, right? So it's got the stratification. So you've got kind of ride-share luxury, and then you've got kind of the ultra-premium chauffeur luxury. TBR is a company that many people in this room, I would expect, would know. You may not know my name, but you've almost certainly been in one of their cars. For example, their client list includes 16 of the top 20 investment banks for non-deal roadshows. I don't know who the other four are. I feel bad for you guys. You guys got to get a program. But the point is, but anyway, and it's used to exactly that. I mean, honestly, there is no, you know, if you're 10 minutes late to the appointment, you know, you're never hired again type thing. So that sets a level of luxury that is, frankly, above typically, you know, anything that Lyft is able to offer today. It's putting those two together and really trying to figure out how to kind of create some kind of cross-pollination between the two that I think really opens up that opportunity for us. Okay.
At the other end of the spectrum, you've been very consistent talking about the need to make products more affordable to drive rider growth into the platform over time. Maybe update us a little bit on where those efforts sit in terms of driving more affordability. And I would love to also talk about how affordability can also be tied back to some of the insurance dynamics in the business that we're seeing play out as well in 2026.
Sure. Yeah, I love the set of questions. I mean, the first thing I have to say about affordability is your best – actually, let me zoom way out. I'll take 30 seconds of context. The first thing to remember is we'll do a billion rides. The other guys in North America, you know, worldwide, the other guys maybe a couple billion to three billion in North America, something like that. So maybe between the two of us we have three to four billion, something like that. Okay, that's a big number, but guess what? People take, just in North America, 160 billion rides in their own car every year. Why do I start with that? Because guess what? Rideshare is inherently affordable for many people. Average cost of a new car right now, $50,000. That's $800 a month. $800 a month plus gas, $900, plus insurance, $1,100, maintenance, $1,200, whatever else. Okay, compare that to a $20 lift drive. So let's just start right there. Rideshare is affordable, and I think that's one of the reasons why we're still seeing so much great industry growth independent of the company because it's a good product, and you can text, and you can drink if you want to, all the things. Okay, now let's move forward. So in the affordability side of things, we want to have a ride for every single price point. Frankly, it starts with bikes. I don't know if you've been out in San Francisco, you guys. We now have lift bikes on the street. I hope you take them. If you don't take them, I haven't taken one yet. Take one to dinner. It's an awesome experience. Very affordable option. I was on stage with Daniel Lurie a couple weeks ago. By the way, Mayor Mondavi feels the same way in New York City. The bike system is going to be a big infrastructure for a city that's very affordable. Then you've got wait and save. We were the innovators there. It's still a great product for us. For people who want to wait a little longer, they can pay a little bit less. Then you have our standard offering. Best way to save money in standard is to check both apps. We say it over and over again, save money, check lift. Here's an interesting thing. On average, if you check both apps over the course of a year in New York City, save $180. By the way, if everybody checked both apps whenever they wanted to ride share, we'd do pretty well. We'd do pretty well. That would be very good for us. So just think about that. So that's another affordability option. Then we have extra comfort. Then we've got the black and sort of less affordable options. So our goal is to allow anyone who wants a ride to open up our app and shop within our – If they want to cross back and forth, that's totally fine. But at the end of the day, obviously, I want them to end up where we are. And then the last thing I'll say is then we have very specific affordability options that we've innovated around. Price lock would be a good example. If you don't like surge pricing, fine. Pay us $3.99, $4.99 in a month for our route, and you'll never have to pay more than the average price there. So it's a multifaceted approach. It starts with the fact that we're an affordable option compared to your next best alternative or even compared to the other guys in many cases, and then we try to build in from there.
Oh, and then you mentioned insurance. Yeah, I was curious, like, obviously there's been changes in the business from an insurance standpoint. What does that do to your P&L, and how can the reforms around insurance also feed back into maybe funding some of these initiatives from an affordability standpoint? So it's very interesting.
Okay, again, we'll step back for every one of these questions just to give a little context. I mean, the first thing you have to – okay, insurance is a very large cost for rideshare, as you know, in the billions of dollars. So you have to start, before you even get to the policy reform, with do you have a well-managed insurance program? We have, I believe, best-in-class managed insurance program. We've got amazing people on it. We have amazing technology behind it. We have a whole set of tools. It's everything from the safety tools that we have to the claims management tools and everything in between. And the way we interact with our partners, I'm talking about our insurance partnership, is very, very deep. Very, very deep. We, yeah, yeah, we exchange a lot of data because we, in some sense, have a common outcome, which is we'd like to reduce accident, frequency, and severity. Okay, but you can only go so far, given the policy framework, particularly in certain states, California sort of being Exhibit A, where insurance minimums are so high, they encourage all sorts of crazy, perverse behavior. As you know, and you're kind of alluding to, we had a very, very significant insurance, I would call it a policy win this last year. We had a smaller one in New York. We had a very big one in California. To give you a sense of the order of magnitude, it could be $6 in a single ride that you're paying just to cover the million-dollar minimum insurance prior. Now it's more down to $300,000 or so. And so then the question is, well, where does that extra money go, quote-unquote? And the basic answer, if you go back to our strategy, is we want to give it back to our customers. We want to give it back to our customers, right? We want to give it back to riders in the form of lower prices. We want to give it back to drivers in higher pay and in greater volume. The case study of California is very interesting, and I'm going to be sort of illustrative here rather than quantitative, but looking from your perspective, you might say California growth was kind of looking like this for a period of time. Then we went into reform mode, and you might say it kind of looked kind of like this because these things take a while for people to change their behavior. And now you would say it is going like this. And so every state we can bring this kind of level of sort of policy reform to, we'll do it.
Okay. Understood. it. You alluded earlier to partnership strategy. You have a lot more of these partnerships in place now than you've done in prior periods. Talk a little bit about what you've learned about the customers who come to you via these partnership strategies and how you think about the opportunities set to grow the entryway into your platform into a broader example of LTV, of customer cohort over I love that.
And I think, you know, if you're – some analysts kind of stay at high level. Some analysts like to go down deep. This is an area, actually, I think the depth pays off because the partnership – each partnership plays its own role, both for us and for our partner. Let's give a couple of examples. Well, first, again, a reminder, about 30% of our rides are tagged to partners, up from 20% a couple of years ago. And we would expect that will continue to climb because it's a very, very important part of our customer acquisition and retention strategy. Okay, now let's break it down a little bit. Let's look, for example, at DoorDash. Okay, so DoorDash is a relatively new partner in our portfolio, but we are thrilled with the partnership, thrilled. And it's not just early indicators anymore. It's now been in place for some time. But the most recent indicator is our recent entry into Canada with DoorDash has wildly exceeded our expectations. It's a crazy number of 40% up of something. I forget exactly what. What I can tell you is, and here's the thing I absolutely do remember, we had certain annual goals for that partnership in terms of new customers that are linked, and we've exceeded those annual goals already, and the Canadian expansion just happened a couple of months ago. So, okay, what does that tell you? What that tells you is it's working for us, and it's working for them. How is it working for us? It drives frequency, right? People eat three times a day, and so that's a frequency driver for us. For them, what it allows them to do, quite obviously, is it allows them to have a competitive offering with a competitor, and that's very helpful for them. So it absolutely helps with companies and you would expect that partnership to continue to deepen over time based on how successful it's been for both of us. Let's look at United Airlines. Okay, United is a newer partner. Here's a very interesting fact. You can now earn United Mileage Plus miles by taking lift. You can burn them as well. People have earned roughly in the six months or so that it's been out, maybe a little bit more, I think it's about 600 million miles so far and they have burned roughly 300 million miles so far. In other words, spent those miles on left. Why is that good? Okay, it's good because United customers tend to be travelers, obviously. So they tend to take airport trips, obviously, which tends to be longer and higher margin, higher price trips, probably, obviously. People tend to level up. They take extra comfort in black to airports more often than others. So that's good for us. Why is it good for United? It's good for United because most people, not the people in this audience, but most people travel maybe once or twice a year on airlines. So you don't have that many ways to spend your points. which means your points only have a certain value. But if you can spend your point every single day on Lyft, it increases the value of the point pool, which is good for United because all of a sudden it makes our mileage plus program more interesting to people. So it's a great partnership. By the way, we now show up in the arrival tab, the departure tab, and you can see us growing deeper and deeper there. But it's really around high value, less frequent. Let's take maybe one more, Bilt. Okay, Bilt's a much smaller company. Some of you know it because they're a very significant presence in New York. Built, as you may know, it's a platform that allows you to pay your rent on their app, and then you get points back to do things in your community. How many times do you pay rent a year? Twelve times a year, right? So they have a product that has a certain frequency, but they'd love to interact with their customers every single day. And so through the built point thing, which you can, again, burn and earn, I think people have earned over 1.5 billion points since the beginning of that program. So I know that was a lot of color, but it tries to give you a sense that each one of them has a use for us and has use for our partner. And to wrap it up, I would expect, don't think of us as having 70 partners in five years. Think of us as having, say, five to 10, maybe, but really deep and mutually beneficial.
And you front-ran my follow-up. I was going to ask about how to think about the potential for density in this, but it sounds like you'd rather be deeper with a handful of partners that address maybe certain verticals in general that open up opportunity sets on both sides. That was very clear. All right, we got this far, Ron, we haven't talked about AVs, so we're going to talk about AVs.
What?
I want to give you the opportunity to just lay out your worldview of what's happening right now in mobility and the decisions you're making as a company and a team to align yourselves with the secular themes around autonomous longer term, and then maybe I'll have one or two follow-ups. Awesome.
AVs. The first thing I want to say, and this is, again, you know, Like, if you remember nothing else from today, remember this. There are people who believe that AVs are a threat for our industry. That is dead wrong. It is the biggest gift we could possibly have gotten. The biggest gift we possibly could have gotten. Because it is technology that customers like, right? So if you've taken a Waylo, you know this, right? It feels reliable. It feels private if that's what you want. It feels safe. Magical. And the economics are awesome. Think of the two biggest costs we have in the rideshare industry. We pay drivers a lot of money. We pay insurance companies a lot of money. I would expect over time that will go down, not up. So you don't often get to be in an industry. There's going to be a massive transformation where the product itself is actually getting significantly, step change better, and cheaper to operate. Okay, so that's amazing. So then the question becomes, how is this Lyft responding? And I would argue very strongly, not just from my position, but I think looking at it somewhat objectively, that we are the best-positioned company in the world to take advantage of this Because, first, you've got to have demand, right? If you don't have demand, no one's going to – it doesn't matter, right? And it's very expensive, by the way, to create demand, very, very expensive to create demand. So we have a lot of demand, billion rides a year, 50 million customers, you know, over the course of a year. Then what else do we have? And then we have all the systems that are required to take that demand and turn that into a ride. That's how is it priced, where is the pickup location, where is the drop-off location, What's the gate code for this community? What happens when you leave something in the car? People leave 8,000 times a week today. People leave a phone in a Lyft 8,000 times every week. That's a system that we've built. We've got a crazy system that does all sorts of amazing things. As soon as you get out of the car, it allows you to contact the car, all this sort of stuff. It's quite a bit of work, but now we've taken our average phone. Right now, something like 60% of people get their phone back in less than three hours, which is a huge deal compared to 0% a couple years ago. So anyway, if all these systems that take millions of ride requests every single year and translate them to ride, that's one thing that we have, as well as we have millions of customers. Then what's the next big piece is you've got to manage these things. These are physical assets. They take up space in three dimensions. They don't charge themselves. They don't reboot themselves. They don't clean their own sensors. They don't do any of these things themselves. All of that takes human labor, and it takes expertise. We've been doing this now for over a decade. We have a subsidiary called FlexDrive. FlexDrive owns anywhere from 10,000 to 15,000 cars. It was originally designed for drivers who didn't want to use their own car, but now we've extended that to AV capabilities. And this is truly best in class. This is all about making sure that that asset, that multi-hundred-thousand-dollar asset today, which may be someday is $50,000, but for some period of time it's going to be hundreds of thousands of dollars per car, has to be utilized, has to be available. And it's all about making sure that that's available. If I compare our availability rates to another, so think of 100 cars, how many of them are available to drive at any one time? Think of us, then think of Hertz. And I'm not picking on Hertz. I'm just using them as an industry example. Hertz might be very excited if 80 of those 100 cars was available to drive at any one time. Be very excited. I think they'd have done a very good job. We would be disappointed if it were less than 90. That's our record. I mean, that's our SLA.
Okay, so there's physical infrastructure.
We can come back to what that kind of feels like and looks like. We've opened up in Nashville recently. It's kind of an interesting case study. And then there's a whole set of policy issues that have to be sort of worked out, and there's a whole set of other issues that have to be worked out. But our job here, and now I'll stop, is we want to be the company that is the best position to take this very expensive R&D, billions of dollars worth of R&D, and take the products that are coming out of those R&D labs and commercialize them. We want to be the absolute best way, the best demand generator, the best fleet operator, obviously, and then the best partner.
So there was a lot in there, but let's maybe distill it down to one question I'll ask as a follow-up, which is what I find investors struggle with is what milestones or roadmap am I supposed to be following for how this ecosystem evolves? You've made a number of partnership announcements. There's more vehicles that are going to come on the road with each passing quarter and year. How would you anchor investors around thinking about what should they be mindful of to gain more confidence in your strategy with respect to AVs?
So it's a very, very good question. It has a multidimensional answer, but I will really try to simplify. But the first level study I think we have to do is this will take time. And the reason is because it's physical world, it's city by city, it's policymaker by policymaker, it's OEM by OEM. You know, many things have to line up, right? So then that becomes, well, okay, to your point, what are the big milestones you should look at? And if I were in your shoes, I might take a number of cities as an example, top-tier and second-tier cities, and I might start to look across them and say, okay, where is there enough demand? Where is there a good chunk of demand where rideshare companies can really work? Anyway, because you have to have demand, otherwise assets can't be utilized. Where is there a technology partner, you know, an ADAS provider, you know, a self-driving car provider, who is capable of operating at some scale with, very importantly, driver out, right? So that's going to be another thing. Then where are policy things lining up? And then where is their physical infrastructure being built out in each of the cities? And I think when you start to see, you know, not just one city or three cities or five cities, but 10, 20, 30 cities, where you can check all those boxes, where you can see some sort of driver out at scale thing going on, where you can start to see the policy kind of lining up to open up, because a lot of people can say, okay, we're good to up to 200 cars. We're not going to do 2,000 cars. Where you start to see physical infrastructure of the type we've put in Nashville. Again, I'll come back to that. I think it's going to be you sort of have to be able to check all of those boxes over the next couple of years, and that's what's going to start to kind of open your eyes. If I were going to say one last thing, I would say by 2030, I think, you know, it's quite possible we will be doing at least 10% of our business through AVs. Still, 90% driver-driven, let's be clear. The hybrid network is the, you've got to have it, otherwise it's very, very difficult to create a great service. But 10% might be AVs. I would then, if I kind of stepped into it, here we are in 2026, I would expect in 2027 you to see some significantly larger-scale driver out across multiple cities. and then it'll be in 28, 29, and 30 where things really start to scale up.
Okay, that is very clear. Micromobility, you referenced it earlier. How should investors think about where you operate with micromobility today, what some of the building blocks or growth are going forward, and how to think about even geographic expansion in areas like micromobility, if that's an area of focus? Yeah, love that.
You know what, Eric, if you don't mind, and this could be a first, I'm actually going to turn it back to ABs for one more second. Nuts, right? Because I do want to say one thing. We just started to take yesterday. It was our first day of accepting riders onto Waymo's in Nashville. And I think if you're looking back to your earlier question, if you want to see sort of a microcosm of how this is going to get built out, you know, there's a back-end piece to it where we're currently managing a temporary depot. That goes to a full-time depot starting in the middle of October, 80,000 square feet, four and a half megawatts of power to this thing to keep this in charge. Availability is going to go. and then you look on the demand side, the integrated marketplace we've created with Waymo where you can literally get Waymo on the Waymo app or the Lyft app, I think you can almost start to use, because they're sort of tip of the spear. So I might encourage you to look at that city and see the progress there and then see how many other cities are following the same path. Okay, back to your micro-mobility question. Okay, micro-mobility is amazing. It is, you know, we're primarily talking about e-bikes, of course. If you look at sort of the trajectory of mobility around the world, and that's just in the U.S., it's really the introduction of e-bikes that have all of a sudden taken cities and flattened them, right? Even a city like San Francisco. It makes the whole city available to you on an e-bike, and we feel that every day. Just so that everybody knows, we run the bicycle system here in San Francisco, in New York, in Chicago, in where else? Portland, in what am I forgetting? He's my man. In D.C., Boston. Yeah, so we're a significant player in that space all across the United States, and then we supply the software and the hardware in around 50 other markets around the world, everything from Barcelona to Madrid to London to Guadalajara to pick cities all around the world. This is an investment we started to make years and years ago because we could see the future. We could see as London was remaking itself as a bike-friendly city, as New York was remaking itself as a bike-friendly city, this would be physical-level infrastructure that fits into a city and tends to be long-lived, 10 to 15 years, and therefore provides a really, really good you know kind of platform for us as a company to kind of frankly get our fingers into in the cities in a deep way and to do something that that riders absolutely love okay now to your question a couple of things we just acquired or in the process of acquiring a company called Surveo Surveo is a bike operator the world's best bike operator I would argue out of Spain so you can imagine that some of the work we do today the end-to-end operations that we do today in places like New York and San Francisco you can start to see in different cities in Europe where today we're kind of a, let's say, sort of a behind-the-scenes vendor. And then I wouldn't be surprised to find us further expanding this as a sort of branding and customer acquisition and retention tool, as well as just a strong economic, it's now a good business economically, but so that actually gives us some space to kind of play around with it. So a little bit of a stay tuned message on that one, but don't ignore it. It's economically good for us, and riders love it. Okay.
We've got about a minute left. I'm going to turn it over to you. When you talk to investors, What do you think is the most misunderstood about the business? And frame it against what you're most excited about the business.
Most misunderstood, I think, is there are people who believe that ride shares' best days are behind it. Dead wrong. Dead wrong. Look at the penetration. Look at the value proposition. Again, $20, and you can tax. And it's safe. And it's only going to get safer and better as AVs come along, and maybe over time even less expensive because of the costing of that. So if you look at that transition, and then you look at Lyft, and look at Lyft, how we're frankly underpenetrated in the U.S. in places like, think again about up, out, forward. Up, we're underpenetrated in luxury. We've got a lot of room to grow there, but we've got great assets to bring to bear. Think of out, overseas. We just doubled our TAM and we acquired a new company, but we're still quite small in Europe compared to the competition, but we're going to be new and interesting and kind of give people a new reason to kind of look at rideshare. And then forward is AVs. look at the economics of AVs long-term, as well as the basic value proposition of a rider that now gets everything they like about drivers, because we're still going to have a lot of drivers on the platform, someone to help you with your luggage or talk to you after a tough day, or sort of your own cocoon. It maybe allows you to take an hour to commute instead of 15 minutes. You can buy a nicer house farther away, because all of a sudden, you're in your own screen world and watching Netflix on the way home. This is mind-blowing stuff, and we're right at the beginning of it, and we're so well-positioned for that. I really appreciate the opportunity to have the conversation. Thanks for coming to the conference.
Please join me in thanking Lyft for being part of this year's event.