Categories
Stocks Technology Travel

Lyft shuts down in-house rentals

I didn’t see this coming. Lyft Rentals is shutting down less than three years after it opens.

Lyft is shutting down its in-house car rental program

Lyft will stop renting out cars from its own fleet and has laid off around 60 employees, according to The Wall Street JournalAs TechCrunch notes, the layoffs have also been confirmed by the LinkedIn posts of affected workers. The people who lost their jobs, The Journal said, worked in operations and covered 2 percent of the company’s workforce. Back in May, the company reportedly wrote in a staff memo that it’s slowing down hiring due to the economic downturn, but that it didn’t have any layoffs planned. Things have clearly changed since then.

Source: Engadget

Lyft Rentals is one of the more affordable options that I see. I thought they were able to make the unit economics work out.

RIP. They will be missed.

Categories
Technology

Lyft doing pretty well with Rentals

Little known is Lyft doing consumer rentals much like Hertz. This play differs from Uber which chose to partner with Hertz and Sixt for their rentals.

Lyft Rentals

Currently Lyft Rentals is super conveniently located in Mission. Will be interesting to see how this pans out as a business.

Update: Lyft has shut down their in-house rentals.

Categories
Technology

Uber partners with Hertz to offer 50,000 Tesla

Uber Technologies Inc on Wednesday said it is launching a new partnership with rental car company Hertz to offer 50,000 Tesla Inc vehicles as a rental option for its ride-hail drivers by 2023.

The announcement comes after Hertz on Monday said it would order 100,000 Tesla vehicles by the end of 2022, meaning that half of the rental company’s Tesla fleet would be reserved exclusively for Uber drivers.

For Uber drivers, Tesla rentals will start out at $334 a week, including insurance and maintenance, and consist mostly of the company’s Model 3 sedan. Uber said the rental cost would drop to $299 per week or lower as the program expands in the coming year.

Yahoo

I think this is a right step to electrification in automobiles. Also great news for Hertz being relevant again with electric cars. And of course, sweet win for Tesla.

This is also related to Newsom’s executive order to have California state to require that, by 2035, all new cars and passenger trucks sold in California be zero-emission vehicles.

Following the order, the California Air Resources Board will develop regulations to mandate that 100 percent of in-state sales of new passenger cars and trucks are zero-emission by 2035 – a target which would achieve more than a 35 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions and an 80 percent improvement in oxides of nitrogen emissions from cars statewide. In addition, the Air Resources Board will develop regulations to mandate that all operations of medium- and heavy-duty vehicles shall be 100 percent zero emission by 2045 where feasible, with the mandate going into effect by 2035 for drayage trucks.

California gov