Instead, the San Francisco ride-hailing company is rolling out Amp, an illuminated device perched on the dashboard that will change colors to help drivers and passengers find each other, and will welcome passengers with a cheery text message like “Hello Sarah.”
“This device represents a modern, sophisticated image for Lyft,” said Tali Rapaport, Lyft’s vice president of product, at a presentation on Monday. “Amp is the best presenter of our brand and where we’re going in the future. We think the mustache is an incredible relic and will live on in an important place in Lyft memorabilia. It’s more a signifier of our past than our present or future.”
Amp serves a purpose beyond changing Lyft’s image from hipster scruffy to techno sleek. Its colored light displays — teal, green, orange, silver, purple and yellow — will help give passengers “greater peace of mind” that they’re hopping into the right Lyft car, especially important at events with multiple ride-hailing cars and on dark or foggy nights.
“Every second we shave off the time it takes a passenger and driver to connect is a win,” Rapaport said.
An updated app will show passengers their personalized Amp color for each ride. Like audience members at a rock concert, they can hold up phones displaying their assigned color as a beacon to help drivers find them.
Besides greeting passengers, Amp can also display text messages such as “Go Giants” or “Happy New Year,” and down the road could help hearing-impaired drivers communicate with passengers, although, at least at first, Lyft rather than drivers will control Amp’s display. Lyft said it wouldn’t use it for advertising other than messages “that enhance the passenger ride experience.”
Uber has experimented with something similar to Amp. A year ago it started tests in Seattle of a color-coded device, called Spot, for drivers and passengers to connect. Spot is a glowing strip attached vertically inside the windshield on the passenger side.
Lyft will roll out the device city by city, mailing it for free to all local drivers. San Francisco, Los Angeles, Las Vegas and New York will be the first four to light up, with Amps coming before New Year’s Eve, Rapaport said. It will hit the rest of the country by mid-2017.
Lyft may be “shaving the ’stache” (in the immortal words of an Uber ad) but it’s still thinking pink. Amp will initially turn pink when a ride is accepted, for instance. “Pink is absolutely a color we will continue to use as a brand indicator,” Rapaport said.
Amp ultimately could be a bridge to a future of autonomous vehicles.
“This is absolutely an extensible solution in a world where there isn’t a driver in the car,” Rapaport said. “We built it to help improve the ride experience today, but we believe it also works well in that world.”
The company said it had 315,000 drivers as of early this year; it hasn’t released an updated number.
Lyft has seen significant growth in the past year, Rapaport said. It’s now in 200 U.S. markets, up from 60 a year ago. In October, Lyft gave 17 million rides, 2.5 times more than in October 2015, and had 1 million new passengers in the month. It declined to say how many rides were subsidized.
Lyft is also launching new TV spots taking humorous aim at archrival Uber as part of a brand campaign called “Ride on the bright side.” They show three tech bros in a conference room at “Ride Corp” talking about Lyft: its drivers are too fast, get too many stars, are too happy with their tips.
The suit-and-tie guy, clearly a riff on Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, throws out outrageous ideas.
“We should have a 10 jillion star rating system,” he says. “Dark stars, I want ’em all dark.”
©2016 the San Francisco Chronicle Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
