Lyft is abandoning its iconic fuzzy mustache to better compete with Uber

It’s hard to be taken seriously when you have a pink fuzzy mustache, that’s pretty much common sense, but it has taken Lyft until just now to come to that conclusion. The company has announced that the silly, if somewhat amusing pink mustache that decorates the front grill of its vehicles in favor of… another mustache, still pink and “about the size of a banana.”

Literally called “glowstaches,” these pink mustaches have dropped the fuzziness in favor of emitting a “gentle pink glow” that gives the mustaches their name. The company will start replacing all of its current mustaches with the new glowstaches this month, which will lock onto the dashboard of Lyft driver using  a series of magnets.

Lyft President John Zimmer explains the reasoning behind this move to Wired:

“Symbolically, the glowstache is meant to reflect a more mature Lyft. Zimmer says it’s “more modern, more fresh, and also more acceptable for everyone.” As McMillin puts it, it’s more up to speed with how the Lyft sees itself today—as a pioneering tech company, one capable of building sophisticated products like Lyft Line, which elegantly and automatically coordinates shared rides among separate users.”

Basically, while the original mustaches were fun and silly back when the company first launched in 2012, not everyone seemed to agree. Lyft found that the fuzzy mustache was way too polarizing – some people loved it and some people hated it – and sought out to create a new symbol that would be more universally liked. Lyft’s drivers also didn’t treat the mustache like an icon, often times attaching is haphazardly to the grill of their vehicle or just not doing it all together.

A Lyft driver expressed his disappointment with the move to Fast Company:

“As a visual person, I appreciated the gonzo quality of Lyft’s pink mustache. Part of the genius of the mustache is that it isn’t cool, and it doesn’t really try to be cool. It just tries to stand out, and stick in people’s memories. And it succeeds brilliantly on those terms. I think it’s a shame that Lyft is phasing out the big dorky ‘carstache’-style mustaches on the car grill in favor of new, cheaper-to-produce ‘cuddlestache’-style mustaches that sit inside the vehicle on the dash. I’ll always have a place in my heart for the big mustache. If you’re gonna go dorky, you might as well go big.”

Whatever your opinions on the mustaches are, it’s clear that Lyft needs to do something if it wants to compete against Uber. Wired’s Kyle VanHemert described the current situation quite accurately when he compared Lyft to David and Uber to Goliath. Uber already operates in dozens of countries across the globe and has billions in funding, while Lyft has yet to leave the States and has only managed to raise an impressive, but comparatively small $300 million.