Raj Kapoor thinks autonomous vehicles will save the Earth. With some caveats. “The big idea is actually making sure that we have all four together: autonomous, electric, shared rides with shared ownership,” explains the chief strategy officer at Lyft Inc. “Climate change is probably one of the world’s biggest challenges,” because one person acting alone can’t really make a difference. “Policy alone can’t change it. Technology alone can’t change it. So I felt like I had to do something.”…
Kapoor made his name in Silicon Valley founding and later selling Snapfish, a photo-sharing service, to Hewlett-Packard for an estimated $300 million in 2005, but he’s long been interested in cars. In the 1970s and ’80s his father engineered superhighways in Pennsylvania, and in the early 1990s, Kapoor worked on an early autonomous vehicle as a Carnegie Mellon undergraduate. In 2011 he joined the board of Lyft.