Lyft Aims to Out-Uber the Competition with New Feature
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Lyft(NEW YORK) — No longer will your Lyft driver assume you don’t like to listen to Taylor Swift in the car just because you’re wearing a business suit.
The ride-sharing company is inviting drivers and passengers to share personal details with each other, including hometown, favorite music and a short bio. The new app feature will launch early next week for iOS users, “with Android soon to follow,” Lyft says.
“We chose hometown because we know roots grow deep,” Lyft wrote in a blog post. “We added favorite music because music is both a universal and personal connector.”
Lyft emphasizes that sharing any information is completely optional. Drivers can choose to include their star rating and ride count also.
“Profiles is a new feature that gives passengers and drivers the option to share fun facts about themselves and discover mutual friends and interests,” the company wrote in a blog post Thursday.
The basic premise of Lyft will stay the same: users who have already provided their credit card information request a ride in an app. Then they get automatically matched with a Lyft driver in the vicinity. After the ride, passengers can choose to add a tip.
Last year, Lyft introduced Lyft Line, giving passengers the ability to share a Lyft ride with other customers going in the same direction for a fixed lower price, up to 60 percent less.
Uber has already tried its hand at a more personalized experience. Starting last November, Uber allowed passengers to control the music in their cars through a partnership with music streaming service Spotify.
Lyft, based in San Francisco, serves 65 U.S. cities, most recently launching in Philadelphia in late January. Its mega-competitor Uber, also based in San Francisco, has faced a number of publicity hurdles, including driver safety concerns and transportation regulation, as it has expanded to 55 countries, or over 270 markets around the globe.
On Wednesday, Uber released an informational safety video that emphasizes that Uber drivers pass federal, multi-state and county background checks and that each ride is covered by a $1 million commercial insurance policy. Like Lyft, Uber champions the safety benefits of having a digital record of a trip history.
A spokesman for Uber told ABC News that regulatory frameworks have been approved in 24 jurisdictions for ridesharing.
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