GM president Dan Ammann has left Lyft’s board, the latest sign that the automaker and ride-hailing company are looking more like competitors than allies.
Ammann’s departure comes just two years after GM formed a partnership with Lyft that included a $500 million investment and a board seat. Ammann will be replaced by Maggie Wilderotter, a former CEO of Frontier Communications who serves on the boards of Costco, Wholesale Corp., Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Cadence Design Systems, and DocuSign, Lyft said on Wednesday. She is also a senior adviser to the Blackstone Group and Atairos Private Equity.
Wilderotter is the third woman, and second independent director, to join Lyft’s board. Ann Miura-Ko, co-founder of venture firm Floodgate Fund, and independent director Valerie Jarrett, a former senior adviser to President Barack Obama, are also on Lyft’s board.
A source close to Lyft has described Ammann’s departure as amicable, noting that he picked Wilderotter to fill his spot.
“As both companies have evolved, we understandably find ourselves in somewhat competitive positions,” the source told Fortune.
In 2016, when GM invested in Lyft, the ride-hailing company was considerably smaller. At the time of the deal, Lyft had 17% share of the ride-sharing market and completed more than 7 million rides a month in the U.S. Rival Uber had more than 80% market share.
Lyft now has 35% market share in the U.S. and its currently completing more than 10 million rides weekly. Lyft doesn’t provide quarterly financial figures. However, information provided by a source close to Lyft suggests the company’s revenue growth is gaining momentum.
Lyft expects to have a bookings run rate—an extrapolation of how the company will do in the next four quarters based on its second quarter estimate—of $7.7 billion. Lyft doesn’t provide specifics on its revenue, but a company spokeswoman did say revenue grew 139% in the first quarter of 2018 from the previous period, double the growth rate Uber experienced over the same time.
The long-term aim for the Lyft-GM partnership was to deploy GM self-driving cars within Lyft’s service. But their actions in the past two years is pushing them apart. GM is investing heavily to develop and deploy autonomous vehicles. Just months after its partnership with Lyft, the automaker acquired self-driving car startup Cruise Automation and it’s been rapidly ramping up its testing ever since.
Last month, Japan’s SoftBank announced it would invest $2.25 billion into GM’s self-driving car unit to help bring fleets of autonomous vehicles to market faster. Softbank is also an investor in Lyft rival Uber.
Meanwhile, Lyft formed partnerships with several companies including startups Drive.ai and nuTonomy, and Waymo, the Google self-driving car project that spun out to become a business under Alphabet. In September, Lyft partnered with Ford to develop and test self-driving vehicles on its ride-hailing network.
