Trying to convince Americans to stop buying cars won't save Lyft from being wildly unprofitable

REUTERS/Mike Blake

Doomed.

• Lyft staged its much-anticipated IPO on Friday.
• The ride-hailing service has been growing, but it's also losing money. Lots of money.
• To reverse the losses, Lyft needs to grow outside urban areas and convince customers to stop owning personal cars.
• Americans in rural and suburban areas are never going to stop owning cars, so Lyft has no path toward profits via this route.

At the end of trading on Friday, Lyft could be worth somewhere around $21 billion, following its much-anticipated IPO priced at $72 per share. Lyft started trading at $87.40 per share upon its debut on the Nasdaq.

Investors ranging from Silicon Valley venture firms to General Motors and Lyft's founders will see a nice return. But once the warm glow of wealth fades, unprofitable Lyft will have to figure out how, if, and when it's going to make money.

Ride-hailing services such as Lyft and Uber have grown rapidly, but that growth has depended on displacing taxis in urban areas, as well as jamming cars onto already congested urban streets and creating for residents of cities like New York a neverending traffic crisis.

A key theme that's emerged - or more accurately, re-emerged, as it was often discussed in the years before Lyft and Uber were founded - is de-ownership of personals cars leading to rampant ride-hailing usage outside of big cities. Presto! Profits!

Read more: Uber wanted to be a monopoly - but it may have to settle for the next best thing

You could argue that until self-driving vehicles arrive and eliminate Lyft's labor costs, de-ownership is the company's only hope. Perceptions of the trend, and optimism about its prospects, are driven by the oft-cited disdain that young people have for owning cars.

De-ownership is a sucker's bet outside big cities

Wikimedia Commons

People aren't going to stop buying.

Those ownership-disdaining young 'uns mostly live in big cities, however, where having a car has never made much sense. Believe me, as someone who owned four cars in New York City, you're talking about a commitment. Lyft built a business on this relatively easy money - admirably in the face of cutthroat competition from Uber.

I'm not a betting man (my last shot at a poker night left me broke in two hours), but if I were, I'd bet against Lyft ever making money on the idea that people will give up their personal cars outside the urban Northeast and San Francisco. This is because although owning a car is costly, it's also convenient.

It isn't convenient in New York City, of course, but it never has been. Hence the popularity of taxis and so-called "black cars" for decades before Lyft showed up. But everywhere else, if you have the means, you put a car in the driveway and deal with it. That's why we've seen in the US four consecutive years of new-car sales topping 17 million units - around 70 million vehicles in total (many of them, I'm sure, cars bought or leased by Lyft drivers).

A rational analysis of Lyft's business would note that the company has created a large user base at the same time the auto sales have surged in the US. The conclusion should be that Lyft obviously isn't killing the desire of Americans to own vehicles but rather drinking the taxi business's milkshake.

A classic IPO strategy

John Sciulli/Getty Images for Lyft

Would you invest?

Perhaps marginally, you have some Lyft users who don't live in Manhattan and make use of service. I'm one of these people. But I have a non-driving teenager and I periodically need to drop my car off at a dealership for service, or I need to get around in another city. But even though I test new cars for a living, owning a personal vehicle is more than worth it for me.

I don't think there's any way Lyft is going to expand these margins. To do so, it would have to reduce new-car sales in the US, not just from the current record levels, but far below what the industry calls the "replacement rate" - about 15 million vehicles per years, the churn of old cars being swapped out for new ones. And by "below the replacement rate," I mean WAY below it. With its ~ $21-billion market cap, Lyft has around two-thirds the value of Ford ($33 billion).

This sets up a near-classic IPO move. The early investors in Lyft bet on growth, and growth they got. They didn't bet on profits, and now they get their payout minus positive margins (Lyft's cap will probably hold up through the lock-out period, at which point I expect early investors to exit). So from now on, every single dollar that goes into Lyft stock is an option on de-ownership outside major US cities.

Even if this isn't a bankrupt option, suburban and rural de-ownership could take decades to appear, if it appears at all, which it won't. Lyft's other problem is that it's probably going to ultimately find itself in the position of being the lesser Uber, constantly vulnerable to Uber's aggressive pricing strategies. Eventually, with Uber taking something like 70% market share and Lyft clinging to 30% (speculative figures, but consistent with recent estimates), Uber will just out-spend Lyft into a deep, deep hole (unless Uber collapses under its own challenging cost structure).

Maybe some savvy investor can tell me how this will all work out great for Lyft and rescue the dumb money that might now pile in. But I've covered cars and the car business for a long time, and if you asked me to design a perfect capital-obliteration company in transportation, I couldn't come up with anything better than what Lyft already is.

This is an opinion column. The thoughts expressed are those of the author.