The ride-sharing firm Lyft announced two moves Wednesday to help it attract more Salt Lake City area drivers — including people who don’t own cars and those who need help to drive more environmentally friendly vehicles.
The San Francisco-based company opened a new local headquarters in what was once an old gas station owned by Rocky Mountain Power for company vehicles in its campus around a power plant on North Temple at 1300 West — and announced a partnership with that company to convert the facility into a charging station for Lyft drivers with electric cars.
“Electric vehicle-charging stations will be installed to support our growing fleet of electric vehicles as part of Lyft’s Green Cities Initiative,” said Jeremy Neigher, Lyft’s Utah market manager.
Bill Comeau, Rocky Mountain’s managing director of customer innovations, said the utility is proud to partner with companies to help them achieve sustainability goals. “We couldn’t be more excited,” he said, to take an “old building that was once a gas station” and convert it into a facility that “has the potential to be a center for future electrification of vehicles.”
Neigher said Lyft chose to make the building its local headquarters also because it is near another new partner, Hertz rental cars. They work together to remove “one of the biggest obstacle to driving for Lyft, which is car ownership.”
Neigher said Hertz is working with it to provide weekly and monthly rentals for “drivers who don’t have access to either a car of their own, or access to the right car,” but want to make money by driving for Lyft.
The new Lyft center will also serve as a bricks-and-mortar center for drivers to receive training and help with problems from using its online app to issues with payment, Neigher said.
