In 2013, when Uber focused on operations using properly-licensed black cars, CEO Travis Kalanick remarked on what he saw as Lyft’s unlawful “ridesharing” approach using ordinary drivers:
I’m like, holy cow, every trip that’s happening—I’m reading the law—every trip that’s happening is a criminal misdemeanor committed by the person driving. I don’t think that’s a good law, but that is the law.
Kalanick explained three sources of cost advantage from Lyft’s unlawful approach: foregoing commercial licenses, foregoing commercial insurance, and thereby accessing a larger pool of potential drivers:
What they were able to do because of no commercial insurance and because of easy access to supply, the cost was really low. You could see a situation where they’d eat you up from the bottom up.