Lyft Is Dropping Its In-House Car Rental Service, Lays Off About 60 Staff

Lyft has joined the list of tech companies that are cutting their workforce.

Lyft Is Cutting Its Workforce

According to a Wall Street Journal staff memo, the company is apparently laying off 60 employees and downsizing its worldwide operations team by reducing regions from 13 to 9.

Less than 2% of the workforce was affected by the layoffs, and those working in operations were primarily impacted.

TechCrunch mentioned that the company had verified the information about the layoffs, which was first discovered in LinkedIn posts [1,2,3] by recently retrenched Lyft workers.

According to posts that have appeared on LinkedIn, operations staff were the prime candidates for Lyft's layoffs. These posts suggest that at least some employees received a 30-day notice to clear their desks.

The Company Is Also Shuttering Its In-House Car Rentals Program

Aside from retrenching staff, the company is discontinuing the part of its operations that lets users use the app to rent one of its fleet of vehicles. There were five locations for Lyft's car-rental service, Fox Business reported.

According to a spokeswoman for the company, it will continue to collaborate with major car-rental companies. It has car-rental agreements with Sixt SE and Hertz Global Holdings Inc. in more than 30 sites.

The company is closing a site in Northern California and its hub in Detroit as part of the reorganization of its global operations team, as per the memo sent by Cal Lankton, vice president of fleet and global operations at Lyft.

Automakers Also Laid Off Staff Due to Economic Situation

Tesla CEO Elon Musk said in June that he intended to downsize the employees by 10% since he felt the economy was in a bad place. With that, Tesla officially started the process of decreasing its workforce.

Some former Tesla employees have written on LinkedIn claiming they were fired due to the company's cost-cutting measures.

The job reduction has also had an impact on senior roles. As part of the company's efforts to minimize the number of employees, Christopher Bousigues, who served as the national manager for Tesla in Singapore, announced on LinkedIn that he had been dismissed.

Meanwhile, Rivian, a well-known automaker, may soon lay off workers. Although it hasn't made an official announcement, the company is reportedly thinking about cutting approximately 5% of its 14,000 employees. By this percentage, if Rivian proceeds with its plan, about 700 of its employees could soon lose their employment.

Recently, Rivian expanded its capacity for producing electric vehicles (EVs). Since the beginning of 2022, it has manufactured more than 2,500 vehicles.

The mass layoff specifically targets non-manufacturing staff whose employment was added as it scaled up. As a result, employees at Rivian with non-manufacturing roles in regions where Rivian has rapidly expanded, and those with duplicate functions are more at risk of losing their jobs.

Rivian has a reason for dismissing hundreds of workers. In spite of producing over 2,553 EVs and delivering 1,227 of them as part of its goal to build 25,000 by the end of 2022, the company nevertheless lost about $1.59 billion in the most recent quarter.