All right. Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to our next Fireside Chat keynote here at the Morgan Stanley 2025 TMT Conference. It's great to see you all. We are really thrilled today to have David Risher, the CEO of Lyft, with us. Thanks for joining us.
Yeah, of course. Great to be here, you guys.
Before we get started, I will read the disclosures. Please note that all important disclosures, including personal holdings disclosures and Morgan Stanley disclosures, appear on the Morgan Stanley website at www.morganstanley.com/researchdisclosures. They are also available at the registration desk. Some of the statements made today by Lyft may be considered forward-looking. These statements involve a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. Any forward-looking statements made today by the company are based on assumptions as of today, and Lyft undertakes no obligation to update them. Please refer to Lyft's Form 10-K for a discussion of the risk factors that may impact actual results.
Damn, you are an auctioneer.
Yeah, I'm in the limelight. I try to see how fast I can go through it because there's always so much to talk through. So it's great to see you.
Thanks.
You've been in the role now since 2023.
Yeah.
It's a very dynamic industry with a lot of changes going on, both in the core business, growth in the core, AV discussion, the international expansion with Canada, et cetera, so maybe now you're a couple of years in. Walk us through sort of how your prioritization, how you're spending most of your time on key priorities in 2025 to ensure you're sort of checking the right boxes for the company to drive durable growth.
Sure. So great question, kind of a fun place to start because it has been almost exactly two years now. So I might start exactly where we are right now, which is we have never been in a stronger position, and I feel proud and confident saying that. And what do I mean? What I mean is we have more active riders than we've ever had. We've got more driver and driver hours than we've ever had. Maybe most interestingly, we pick you up about a minute faster than we did a year ago. And it's actually about 30 seconds faster than the big competitor. So when you look at, and then we have things like Women+ Connect and Price Lock and all these different things.
And so when you look at that, what you see. Oh, and then remember, we have 161 billion rides that people take in North America in their cars, right? 161 billion. So remember, we do less than a billion, call it 800 million rides. Maybe the competition does another twice that. So you're talking about 3 billion out of 161 billion. So it's a really nice, and then obviously we've done well financially, right? We've got profitable. We've gone from, let's say, losing $300 million in cash for the prior 12 months to +$760 million, so a $1 billion swing. And we've got a strong balance sheet. So it's a very nice position to be in now because we can see a very large market. We can see where we're super low penetrated. We can see service levels that are better than they've ever been before.
We're really well set up to capture the future. I like that.
Great. Okay. Well, now we'll move on to the obligatory section on AV. So a couple of weeks ago, you put out an interesting blog post about sort of Lyft's competitive positioning within AV and how you think about the AV industry evolving. So let's sort of start there. How do you think about the largest value adds that Lyft brings to the AV industry the next three, five, 10, 20 years?
Yep. Yeah. Great question, and yeah. So I'm actually going to ask people to sort of look up in the computers for a second because I'm going to draw a visual with my hands, and it goes like this. If you look at the AV value chain, you've got the technology creators, right, and we know who they are. They're the Waymos of the world. They're the Zooxes of the world. They're the May Mobilities, who's a partner of ours. They may be the Teslas of the world in the future, and so they're Mobileye, again, a partner of ours. Okay, so that's the technology stack, and we'll come back to that, but I think there will be many more players over time. That's a very dynamic area, then you move, let's say, to the right, and then you have the OEMs, right?
This is the VWs of the world that today works with Mobileye, the Toyota Siennas or Toyotas of the world, which works with May Mobility. Cruise is no longer its own thing, but GM obviously is an OEM that's very active in the space. So you've got Jaguar, works with Waymo, so on and so forth. Okay. Then you move one step to the right, and then you have who's going to buy all these things, right, so someone's going to make the tech, and then someone's going to build the car. And there's a lot of integration work that has to happen, and someone's got to buy these things and own these things. And one of the beautiful things about the rideshare business model is we operate 2 million rides a day, 800 million rides a year. But we don't own very many vehicles at all.
So that's very nice. Individual drivers own those vehicles today. In the near term, which means very good return on invested capital, obviously, we don't have to spend a lot of money to make a lot of money. That's great. Now, in the AV space, though, today, it's the OEMs and the Waymo, and they kind of own their own stuff. But in the future, there will have to be other owners because there's just not enough money in the world. So we have a deal with this company called Marubeni. Marubeni is a big financing group. They're a trading company out of Japan. They have very good interest rates. They like owning assets. They like managing assets. We'll come back to that in a second. And now I get to the point where you're sort of going, Brian, which is then you move the next step, fleet management. Okay.
What is fleet management? No one knows what this thing is. What this thing is, is like if you've got, call it, 500 cars, which is roughly the number of cars that are floating around here in San Francisco that are operated by Waymo, as an example, you've got to park them. You've got to charge them. You've got to clean them. You've got to maintain them. You've got to repair them. You've got to make sure that they're making money for you, right? And every one of those activities is a physical activity that requires expertise and excellence. Now, we have a facility, not a facility, I mean, many facilities, but we have a subsidiary called Flexdrive. Flexdrive has been doing exactly this type of work for the last five years.
The reason it exists within Lyft is because we allow drivers who don't want to use their own car to basically rent a car through us, or through Hertz, by the way, and then use Flexdrive as effectively their fleet management. It onboards the car. It maintains the car. And by maintain, I don't mean like it's changing the oil. I mean it's saying like, okay, this left mirror costs $100, not $500, and should be repaired here, not here, and should take 20 minutes to repair, not 40 minutes to repair. And when it goes in, we get a note saying, a GPS ping saying it's gone in for repair, and it should be out in 20 minutes. And if it's taking longer than 20 minutes, something's wrong.
Like doing that at scale, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for we have between 10,000 and 20,000 cars on the platform. That's a lot of expertise. And the AV guys are building that up themselves. If you go to one of their depots, you'll see it in action. It's quite complicated. We add a tremendous amount of value there because that's something that the AV guys are saying, shoot, we don't necessarily need to do that all ourselves when we can outsource that to people like you who know how to do it. We have today about a 90% ready-to-drive rate. So effectively, ready-to-drive. So the cars that are on our platform that we own, the Flexdrive, they're ready-to-drive. And that's higher than like a Hertz or an Avis. It's industry-leading. So that's an area of big value add.
Even though it's quite technical and quite sort of like back office, physical, it really matters if you're trying to expand. Okay. Now let's move one more chunk to the right. Let's move to the place that we internally call Marketplace. Okay. What is Marketplace? Marketplace is dynamically, literally millions of times a day, matching up the buyer and the seller, the supply and the demand. So it's every time, and you experience it in what looks like a very simple way. You take out the app, and you see a bunch of what we call ETAs, estimates on how fast the car is going to get there. You see pricing estimates and so forth.
But what you don't see behind the scenes is, again, literally millions of times a day, you're getting this crazy spidering that goes out that says, who's the right driver, and where is the car located, and all the different characteristics of the car, and what's the right price, and how long is it going to take that car to get here, all these things. And that takes a lot of data and a lot of compute power. And when I say, again, we can pick you up 30 seconds faster than the big guys, our primary legacy competitor, I call them, or a year ago, that's all that work. And that's really hard. It's hard to do from scratch, for sure. So we add value there, right? Because the faster you do that, the better you do that, the better you price, the more money you make.
It's full stop. You can spend a lot of money very poorly if you don't get that. And then the last piece of this thing is demand. Where does the demand come from? The demand has to come, of course, again, an app you already have that works 24/7, that's high reliability, that's simple, that's been all the rest. But it's also like, is the brand trusted? Is the brand safe? Does the brand know how to spend marketing against? Because guess what? People need incentives sometimes to take the ride. Otherwise, they just don't do it. So there's a whole demand gen engine. And again, that's an area where we add a lot of value. So you put all that together.
I would say if you look at this as a spectrum, as you get closer to the right, closer to the customers, the demand gen, the marketplace, and then the Flexdrive, that's where we add the most value. As you get closer to the left, you'll see many financing arms. We happen to have, as I say, a partnership with Marubeni, but there'll be others. You'll see many OEMs, VW, pick a bike. You'll see many, many technology providers, some of which you know today and some of which probably haven't even been invented yet because that's how tech goes.
Great. Well, let me drill into a couple of those aspects a little more in detail. Maybe if we start on the left-hand side that you talked about and sort of the autos and the fleet and sort of the financing side. How do you think about the need to deploy some of your own balance sheet over time to finance some of the cars and fleet, or you've only focused on partnerships? How do we think about capital allocation toward the AV importance and strategy?
Totally. So the short version is we're asset light, and we will be that way forever, right? It's part of the business model, and it's quite foundational. Now, we will absolutely buy some AVs, right? We'll do it for two reasons. One, because sometimes there will be partners that say, in order to participate in this, we want to risk share in a certain way. Effectively, it's for R&D on both sides, right? It's like we want to understand what the customer experience is. We want to create a customer experience that's great and differentiated. And by the way, to be very clear, it's not like the AV customer experience is going to exist in some vacuum, right? It's going to be a hybrid model for as far as the eye can see, right? An AV doesn't pick up your luggage.
An AV doesn't hustle a little faster when you're on the way to the airport and are stressed. An AV, for better or for worse, doesn't ask how your day is going. And sometimes that actually is part of the most meaningful part of people's lives when they take rideshare. Not always, of course. So anyway, and then there are parts of the country and parts of even, and when it's snowing or when it's super raining or whatever, or right after the football game gets out or Taylor Swift comes to town. I mean, there's no time in the foreseeable future where there's enough capital and supply for AVs to pick up all the demand. So the hybrid network is a dominant thing.
Now, back to your point, we want to enter that space in partnership as we're doing with May and others, but also we want to do it in an asset-light way. And so to the extent we need to buy assets so that we can do R&D, sure, but to the extent we can have somebody else own it, even better.
Got it. Well, maybe let's stay on the partnerships a little bit. I think you have one partnership with Mobileye that's actually set to deploy some AVs, I think, in Dallas. So as you sort of think through either that partnership or even I think there's even one to come in May this year, what are the KPIs that you and your team are most focused on to sort of ensure that the strategy is going as you hoped it would to sort of put you in the right position for the next 10 years?
Yeah. Makes total sense. So one of the things I haven't, two words I haven't yet said today, which is surprising even to me, is customer obsessed. That's our strategy. Customer obsession drives profitable growth. We say it over and over again. It's how we got to our success so far. It will be continued. It's a long-term, durable strategy. Okay. In this case, we have two customers. We have the end user, the rider, and then we have the owner of the asset, right? So let's actually take both of those very briefly. Okay. So in the May Mobility case, May Mobility, one of only two, it's actually interesting. Everyone knows about Waymo. People don't know so much about May. But May is the only other company that is actively deploying driver-out cars. So in other words, cars with no drivers in them. They're doing that in Phoenix.
They also have driver-in in places, very interesting places like Detroit and Grand Rapids and other cold places with snow. So that's another area where they're really differentiating themselves. Okay. So back to this thing. In this case, it'll be in Atlanta. This is actually news, by the way, about to deploy a tiny little news nugget here. You can note. It will be this summer. So we've previously said this year. Now we will say this summer. And we will have a certain number of Toyota Siennas. That'll be the OEM equipped with May Mobility stuff. In that case, we'll be looking for two things. We'll be looking for how do riders experience it, of course, right? That's fundamental. Does it feel safe? Does it feel reliable? Do I understand what I'm getting myself into here when I order one?
Do I decline it when I realize it's going to be an AV? All these different things. A lot of interesting customer experience pieces to work at. Number one. And how do I work in the hybrid world? Anyway, all that stuff. And then number two, how's May doing, right? We want to be, our strategy for AV partners is to be the best way to commercialize your AV asset. In this case, we have two partners. We'll have Mobileye, and then we'll have, excuse me, not Mobileye. We'll have May Mobility, and we'll have Toyota. And they both have to be happy with the arrangement. So that's kind of it. In the second one, you mentioned Mobileye in Dallas. So that's coming next year. Mobileye in Dallas. It'll be Mobileye technology. It'll be in Dallas. We haven't yet revealed who the OEM provider is there.
But there's also another partner, Marubeni. Marubeni is actually going to own it. And we've said it's thousands, starting with a thousand vehicles. It'll be thousands of vehicles over time. And there, frankly, we need to make sure everyone's making money. Everyone's making money. And that's sort of the trick.
Maybe let's talk about Atlanta then, since that's the Sienna we now know. If we sort of think about how long it might take for that partnership to have an impact on your Atlanta business, how do you think about how long it would take for, say, example, you could perhaps manage the driver fleet more efficiently? If you put in more supply, but the humans are the only ones that can drive to airports, could you actually get airport wait times down, airport pricing down? How long does the dynamic that take to play out?
It's a super interesting question. And I can't tell you with precision yet. Frankly, that's part of it. But I can tell you even what we see here observationally in San Francisco or what we see in Phoenix. So in Phoenix, Phoenix is a very active market for AVs, as you know. And Phoenix is particularly interesting for us because it's an area where we have actually seen our growth accelerate even as Waymo has come onto the scene. So it's very interesting. And we've got to share. So both our growth in Phoenix, to be very clear, is faster than our average. Our average growth is 15%, call it. Our growth in Phoenix is higher than that. That's very interesting. So it suggests one of two things, and probably both are true. Maybe they're taking share from the other guys, but maybe they're also growing the market.
I think that the growing market case is a real one, right? It's a safe ride. Let's be super clear. I mean, not only do self-driving cars know the rules, which we all kind of know, but they actually follow the rules, which is unusual for humans. They don't follow this. They don't text, for example. So that would be a very simple example. It's also a novel experience. It's kind of fun and pretty cool. That's a long way of saying, I think what you're putting your finger on is use cases, particularly the sort of hybrid use cases, are just now beginning to just figure out. I don't really know, but I can tell you the basic premise, of course, over time, which is that AVs will be safer and cheaper to operate and will expand the market.
That's what we believe, and we're trying to get there as fast as we can.
Got it. And that Phoenix acceleration, is there anything you'd share about the way in which the use cases you've seen have changed? Anything you'd call it as more of these types of routes or what are driving the acceleration?
I think part of it is a little bit of a vestige of the fact that, so self-driving cars operate in what's called ODDs. That's just Operational Design Domain, and it's usually a small part of a bigger city, so for example, here in San Francisco, it's fairly small compared to the 49 sq mi of San Francisco. It doesn't go to the airport, doesn't go here, doesn't go there, but it sort of doesn't matter too much because you don't have to take a highway to get from place to place in San Francisco. Whereas in LA, certainly, or in Phoenix even, it's a much smaller part.
So I think what we're starting to see, but this is more speculation, to be honest, is there's certain types of sort of short distance rides within the ODD where people will try a Waymo and then some will, by the way, our retention rate is higher than Waymo. So that's interesting too. That suggests that one use case is novelty. Kick the tires, have a good time, don't do it again. Another use case clearly is point-to-point, high reliability. And it's not necessarily the fastest way to get there, but you kind of know it's not going to cancel on you, all these sorts of things. So somewhat generically. But I'm now just sort of kind of at the edge of what we really know where it's, ask me again in a year, a better answer.
Okay. Let me ask you, I want to throw sort of one of the autonomous bear cases at you and sort of hear your reaction to it, your response to it. So some investors who are more concerned about the rideshare industry and the two leading rideshare players right now because of autonomous will say, well, marketplaces thrive because you're bringing together fragmented supplier bases of millions of drivers.
Yes.
If we get to a world 5- 10 years from now where there are two, three, maybe five software systems that run all these autonomous vehicles, how is it not the case that either A, Uber and Lyft can both be disrupted, or B, the unit economics for both the companies are going to be much more inferior because there's a much more supply concentration in the new world as opposed to the current world?
So I think I'm not super worried about those scenarios. I'll just say it that way. And here's why. I think, first of all, well, first, let's again talk super big picture for a second. If AV tech turns out to be cheaper on a per-mile basis than drivers in the long term, I consider that to be very likely awesome because we will be able to take that supply onto our platform, which is a very valuable and important platform for millions and millions of people, and lower the prices for them, which will expand the market. So that's just a very, very basic statement. Now, so what you have to be saying in order to be worried about that is that you're not going to be able to do that because someone else is going to have the pricing power, right? There's going to be super concentration. Okay.
So let's look at that scenario. So the first thing I would say is I think in, call it 5- 10 years, let's call it 10 years just to make it easy, is that I think the chance, I think basically all cars will have AV tech in 10 years. All cars, right? It'd be very, very unlikely. I think literally like 10 years from now, buying a car without self-driving would be like buying a car without a radio or something. It doesn't make sense. Because today, and just look at what's happened over the last five years. You've gone from cruise control to smart cruise control to lane assist. That's Mobileye's tech, by the way, and Bosch and others. But the point is that tech, it'd be very strange that that tech gets somehow like that. And I think it would also be very unlikely.
Again, just look at the players today. You got Zoox, you got Mobileye, you got Tesla, you got blah, blah, blah. So, Cruise. So even today in the early stages, you've got a fair amount of sort of fragmentation. And I think it's very unlikely that it's going to get super concentrated anytime soon. In fact, I would say it's much more likely the opposite. You'll get these pioneers who are doing their thing, and then you'll get people who kind of step on top of them like, oh, here's the new AI model, which allows us to do it much, much more cheaply. Or here's the new sensor array. We're developing our ADAS that allows us to do this for 2/3 the price or last twice as long. So I don't know.
It just seems somewhat unlikely given the whole history of technology that somehow that's going to sort of super, super consolidate. I think it's this is great. And then the last thing you have to believe is not only that it can consolidate, but that those people are going to have some massive amount of pricing power, which again, in the auto components business, doesn't tend to be really the case. That seems somewhat unlikely. Or that they'll want to completely forward expand to running their own marketplace or doing all this stuff, which will sort of shove us aside, which would again be like a very odd use of their capital allocation. You've already seen GM say that doesn't make sense. So it's not like, I mean, look, comets can hit the planet. Things can happen.
But just, if you look at the more natural economic life, which is I develop a thing, I want to sell it to somebody else who then takes the risk, rather than I want to run it all myself, or I have somehow so much pricing power because I've managed to squeeze everyone else out, making that call at this stage of the game. Even worrying too much about that would seem like a somewhat low likelihood of it.
All right. Now let's turn to the core. So at your Analyst Day, you laid out some targets for mid-teens forward core growth in the bookings business. I want to sort of start and sort of ask now that you've had some time in post-mortem after the Analyst Day now, can you walk us through some areas of execution where you've actually been ahead of where you planned at Analyst Day and which of those will continue into 2025?
For sure. Yeah. So this is really interesting. So here, I mean, I will maybe a little bit of humble brag is about to happen. So we are basically ahead of every single metric we laid out there. Okay? So if you look at active, what are some of the key metrics of the driver business, right? You look at how many active riders do you have. You look at how frequently do they take your platform. You look at how many drivers do you have. And then you look at all the costs to delivering this service. And hopefully, you get to a point where your unit economics are so good, you're making $1, $1.50, $2 a ride, whatever it might be, so that you can drive so much volume across that you just start to spin off cash. And kind of that's what we've done.
So, of course, you know the financial metrics, but if you look at the active riders, for example, we have more active riders on our platform than ever. And at the time, I think we said we were looking for mid-single digits growth in active riders. We actually posted 10% growth in active riders. So that's great. And frankly, if that is true and we're good at managing our costs, everything else is almost automatic. I mean, it's not a, it's kind of a complicated business, but in another way, it's not very complicated at all. If you've got a lot of people coming at the time. And then also, by the way, our frequency is higher than it's ever been before. And that's a very important metric for us because every time a person comes back and takes another ride, you know something good has happened.
That's sort of the gold standard of customer satisfaction. So anyway, long way of saying those targets we set out, we still feel quite confident in, and we're ahead of the curve on really every dimension. I don't think there's a single dimension where we're even at what we thought. We're a little bit ahead in everywhere and a lot ahead in others. Now, what will continue in 2025, I would say that over the last couple of years, it's really been about getting this very, very big market that we operate in, starting to really kind of re-engage in a way that helps us grow and all the things. Okay. While we've made huge efficiency gains, and again, I'll brag about that for just a couple of seconds.
If you look, let's just look at one very simple metric, which would be how many employees. Everyone's focused right now on employee cost cutting, right? That's obviously a big headline everywhere. Okay. If you look at how many employees we had a couple of years ago when I took the job, it was about 4,500. Now we have just south of 3,000. So it's a very significant cut. We cut about 26%. And we didn't make as much noise about it as some people do. But we're doing higher ride volumes on that. So that's pretty cool too. So if you look at efficiency, and so anyway, all sorts of good things have happened on efficiency. Okay. But what hasn't really happened much, much, much is on the margin side. And there's so much work we can do on margins.
If you look at our ride mix right now between Standard and what we call Extra Comfort and Black and Black SUV, we're way too weighted on relatively lower margin Standard rides than we should be. We've got a great product called Wait & Save. That's a very, very good product. A lot of people use it, and it's good. But we've got some work we can do to continue to tune up the economics of it. So we want to compete on service. I want to reset the bar for service across the industry. I think it's going the wrong direction. And I want to do it in a way that is margin accretive. And then we can even talk maybe separately about the Media business and some other things like that. But I think that's the area that's going to get more focus.
Maybe I'll drill into the U.S. and Canada separately. Let me start with the U.S. When we do our swag math, we think the U.S. is sort of growing in the low to mid-teens. We'd love your reaction to that, right or wrong. Either way is always helpful. And then as you sort of think about that growth potential this year, what are the strategies to sort of maintain and accelerate that? Is there what you mentioned? Are there suburbs? Are there cities? What's the U.S. story?
Yeah, sure. Yeah, I'll say a little bit about that. So first, by the way, low to mid-teens, just to clarify, you're talking about on a rides basis or bookings basis?
Bookings.
Bookings. So, yeah. Yeah, I think-ish, right? Yeah, for sure. Yeah, maybe come back to that in a little bit. But yeah, I think that's about right. So, okay, so what do you do? Well, I'll take maybe, let's say, let's take a couple of different lenses to look at. So, one is a geographic lens, to your point. City versus suburb, exurb, all this sort of stuff. And DoorDash talks a lot about this, of course. We've seen a lot of success in what we call low-scale markets. So, in high-scale markets, big markets, big cities and stuff like that, that's a pretty well-understood area. And it's very, very competitive, and there's a lot of supply, a lot of demand, always. But in some of the lower-scale markets, and I'm not talking tiny places, I'm talking like college towns or what have you, there's a lot of opportunity there.
We've seen that. We've seen that. It's grown quite nicely as we've put more of our attention there. Another use case you might look at would be how, and it's not a use case per se, it's more just almost a mindset. For people who are in a hurry, they really want to be picked up fast. They really, really want that. And they're willing to spend a lot of money on that. And they really want it reliable too, right? If we say we're going to be there in two minutes, they don't really want it to come in three minutes. If it's five minutes, they don't really want it to come in six minutes. So I think that's another area. I mentioned this idea of competing on service. I think there's a lot.
I think the whole industry, I think, has been a little bit light on, prior to the last couple of years, a little light on innovation, and there's a lot more we can do to pick you up faster, and then I can tell you all about other new products and services that we're coming up with, so anyway, so I think that gives you maybe a little sense of kind of how we're thinking about growth in the U.S.
Got it.
Yep.
If there are questions for David, feel free to raise your hand. There are mic runners running around. I have plenty of questions to ask. I agree with you on college towns. In Ann Arbor, Michigan, the wait times are much lower with you guys than the other guys. So I am a regular Lyft user in Ann Arbor. Maybe let's talk about Canada.
Yeah.
So what's the Canada growth story? How should we think about cities, products? What are you focused on in Canada?
Yeah. So Canada has been a huge success for us. And I'll say this again with a little bit of precision. So I took the job in April of 2023. And in April of 2023, we were sort of losing share. A bunch of things were not so good were happening. One of the things that was particularly not so good was we really hadn't focused on Canada for a while. We had nominally opened in cities in Canada, in most provinces, but not all. But we really hadn't focused on it. And I would say we decided to take a different tack last year, and we began to focus on it. So Canada rides have basically doubled. Toronto, let's use that as an example.
Toronto has gone from like, I don't know, I don't even know, maybe call it our 20th biggest market last year to I think it's our 6th biggest market right now, and what it shows is that when you take, again, we have a lot of really good technology that does very efficient work at very high scale, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and we can deploy it in all sorts of interesting ways, so when we deploy that and we focus and we tune it for the local marketplace, we can see gains that are actually quite dramatic even outside the United States, so that gives us frankly a little bit of confidence that the work we're doing can scale maybe even bigger than we thought it could.
Okay, and in the front, Mr. SPD.
Thanks very much. Super helpful. Obviously, Waymo taking a different approach in different markets. Can you talk about, is there the potential for you guys to work with them, or is that something that you don't see in the cars?
Yeah, sure. So I always have to be careful with questions like this because I want to signal two things at once. We have nothing to announce, but I think it would be reasonable to expect that we are in conversations with companies like Waymo. And I think part of the reason it's so kind of, let's say, obvious is we bring a lot to that party. We bring a lot to that party. And some of it is quite unique to us. So without getting ahead of anything, and I'm not particularly talking about that one company, I will absolutely say that we are in conversations and stay tuned.
Yep.
Can you talk a little bit about how you see the insurance framework changing over time as you move into AV world, as you go from individual humans driving with only their balance sheet being at risk versus technology providers or OEMs and whoever ends up owning these fleets owning them, how that changes the insurance framework?
I think this is a very—it's quite important. The real answer is I can give you some ideas, but I don't know the real answer, of course. The first thing I should say is insurance is very, so the first thing backing way up for a second is, gosh, is insurance a big deal in the rideshare industry? Effectively, without the insurance industry, the rideshare industry could not exist, right? Just so you know what's happening, every time you get in a Lyft, you have $1 million of coverage on you. That's much higher than you would have in your own car. It's much higher than you would have in a taxi cab. It costs a lot of money. We have a whole group of people. They do a tremendous amount of work trying to make sure that we're negotiating well. We retain some risk.
We outsource some risk. We share a lot of data, a lot of different things. Okay. One of the things that we have learned about insurance is insurance companies, not surprisingly, I guess, are risk averse, right? That's their job. As they manage risk, they would prefer to, yeah, and they really like data. They really, really like data, and I think we're actually industry leading in the amount of data we share. So our setup here is we want to share as much data with our insurance companies as possible so that they can understand how to price properly. Now, when it comes to AVs, so we're setting us up for AVs as well as they come on the platform to share. Now, insurance companies have told us very clearly, obviously, we like the premise of the lower driver incidents. Of course, obviously, everyone wants a safer platform.
And it is safer, I mean, for sure, in that way. Full stop. There's no qualification already. But what else is true is sensors are expensive. Cars are expensive. Accidents still do happen because someone will bump into the thing. All these other things are unknown. And they just don't have that much data. So in the short timeframe, I mean, there's a reason why Google's or Alphabet is self-insuring and so forth. Even the insurance companies don't quite know how to insure. And then comes the issue you're talking about. Who gets the liability? Is it the component guy? It probably wouldn't be the OEM, but remember, even the OEMs, even today, if you open up a Waymo trunk and you look at the Jaguar, the OEM, the Jaguar, has custom-made the cutout.
So they've done work that makes that car not just an off-the-shelf I-PACE, meaning they are sort of taking on some of the liability of the integration here in a sense, right? They're designing for it. So anyway, accident happened. Is it the tech? Is it the OEM? Maybe, maybe not. Is it the owner of the car, which is typically today who has to buy insurance, is the person who owns the car, or is it the operator of the car? In this case, maybe the operator. All I know is I wouldn't be surprised if it showed up in a couple of different places. To be clear, I don't think it's going to be a cost savings in the super near term because of lack of data and because of uncertainty.
In the long term, I think it's going to be great for the industry because I think it's going to be a lot safer a ride. So sorry for not directly answering, but I think that's the state of the world.
On market share, can you expand a little bit in disaggregating the data? Meaning, is there any market where you outdo your competitors or competitors? And what are the lessons that you learned that you can? Because it seems like this market is not talking in aggregate is rather meaningful because supply and demand is always local, am I right?
Yeah.
Tend to be local. So is there any area where you think you have a geography or even in mind space where you think you're winning? And what can you learn that you can apply in order to, yeah.
Yeah, I understand.
Outdo competitors?
Yeah. So I'm not going to say too much about this, but there's actually a really good reason. Okay, so we, of course, look at market share, both in the aggregate, and it's great. When I joined, it was one number. Now it's a higher number. That's great. Okay, but as you say, it turns out to be more of a sort of aggregate of local than just a global number, and we do see, so for example, in Portland, our share is actually quite good. Here in San Francisco, interestingly enough, even again, as new elements come on the scene, Waymo cars, we've actually maintained pretty solid share, which again means the market's probably growing, but Phoenix tech share market share is quite good, as an example, but we haven't really talked too much sort of broadly about that. It's just not information we've shared a lot.
I do want to say one more thing, though, which is your question reminds me of. I think there's a mindset, and I think this is counterintuitive, and I would encourage everyone to think about this. I think the intuition might be, in order for Lyft to do well, our main competitor has to do poorly. We have to take share from them, and truthfully, I don't think of it that way. I think the value maximizing space for rideshare is two healthy competitors. Why? Because they compete. They fight with each other. They compete on driver earnings. Who can pay better? They compete, and by the way, we have a 16 percentage point advantage over the other guys in terms of preference. So that's cool. They compete on who can pick you up faster. When that happens, inevitably, they copy each other.
People always say, "How can you have a competitive advantage in this?" I'm like, "Well, look, we can innovate faster. We can innovate better." And we have. Look at the data. But also, they'll copy us from time to time. I don't care. Because guess what? We'll be on the next version. But meanwhile, in that copying, now the whole market gets bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger because remember, we're tiny, 2% of the overall 160 billion. So it's just a little way of saying, as important as market share can appear, because you're like, "Oh, two players, duopoly, blah, blah, blah," it's sort of like kind of a little bit beside the point versus having two healthy players that act rationally and continue to build new products and services that make this marketplace more and more and more and more people.
I think that is much more likely to be the way that this whole category, this whole sector becomes even bigger and better and more successful. Lyft, obviously, I want us to be better than the other guys and feel pretty good about that.
Great. All right, well, we're up against the clock. David, thank you very much for all the questions.
Of course.
We appreciate it. We're anxious to see the next 12 months and how it all plays out.
Thank you so much. Appreciate it. Thanks, you guys. Thanks for coming.
Thanks.