Lyft and Waymo partner to bring self-driving cars to Nashville riders

This week, Lyft riders in Nashville, Tennessee, who request a ride on the app might get matched with a new driver: a robot.

A new partnership between the ride-hail company and Waymo, the self-driving-vehicle developer, will integrate self-driving rides into Lyft’s platform. (Riders can also request a driverless ride through Waymo’s own app; service there started in April.)

The rollout marks a new milestone for Lyft, which has worked with other, smaller self-driving vehicle companies in the US, but never with a partner as big as Waymo, which operates in 14 US metros. Lyft executives also see the partnership as a continuation of a conversation the ride-hail company has been having for a few years now with its hundreds of thousands of US drivers.

Lyft, like its competitor Uber, insists that its platform will be a “hybrid network” for a long while yet, as human drivers work alongside robot ones. But it’s hard to imagine the transition won’t upend life for some of the millions of professional drivers who work in the US today.

“We've got to make sure we're honest, we're open. We have conversations with drivers and bring them into the journey with proactive communication,” says Jeremy Bird, Lyft’s executive vice president of global growth. “We've done AV [themed] driver forums; we've done driver appreciation events to make sure we're having a conversation. But we're embracing the transformation in the future of AVs.”

A glimpse of what the future might look like can be found in Lyft’s provisional operations depot in Nashville, where employees of its longtime car rental service called Flexdrive now clean, prep, repair, and position Waymos in the right parts of the city so they're ready for passengers. (An 80,000-square-foot, purpose-built depot is set to open in October.) Waymo, which focuses on building autonomous vehicle technology, partners with several companies around the US to help manage and operate its driverless fleets. Of the 72 people who work at this Nashville depot, half of them are former Lyft drivers, the company says.

One of those former drivers, Jonathan Baines, started picking up Lyft riders in 2016 to help support himself as he worked as singer-songwriter. He liked the extra cash but also the people he drove—tourists, locals. “It kind of felt like you were hanging out with your friends more than anything,” he says. Now Baines works as a fleet operations lead, which means he oversees workers cleaning the Waymos, making sure they hit their metrics and standards. It’s the best operations job he’s ever had, he says, “more fun than retail.”

And Baines has to admit: There’s something nice about being alone in a Waymo. “As much as I love to talk to people, to be able to be in the car and relax and not have an obligation to talk with anyone is a nice feature,” he says.

Bird says having Waymos on the Lyft platform will give riders more choice, which is a good thing. Also, more vehicles on the platform means more supply means lower fares. (In a recent earnings call, Lyft executives used data from San Francisco, where it doesn’t offer driverless rides, to suggest that the presence of autonomous vehicles won’t affect the number of rides that human drivers see.) Bird says Lyft intends to continue partnering with different robotaxi companies.

But it may be near-impossible for the new jobs maintaining and directing self-driving cars to neatly replace the driving ones lost. In Washington, DC, where Waymo has fought for months to start service, the company has said that it expects to employ “hundreds” of people if its cars launch there; some 3,200 taxi and ride-hail drivers work in the District (likely many of them part-time). To compensate, Waymo has proposed diverting some of its DC revenue to a fund dedicated to vocational training and workforce development for drivers, to help them transition to other jobs. Waymo did not respond to a request for comment on this story.

Former drivers make up 35 percent of Lyft’s Flexdrive workforce, which is currently in 30 US cities. Hiring former drivers “is an effort we will continue to be very intentional about as AVs become a growing part of the fleet,” Lyft spokesperson Cristian Delgado writes.

Baines is already looking ahead, even beyond that sprawling Waymo depot set to open in October. Part of him misses the “small business” part of being an independent contractor for Lyft. Eventually, he’d like to own his own autonomous vehicle, so it can go out to pick up and drop off passengers without him. “There's the fear of AI taking over,” he says. “I think you can learn how to use AI as a resource.”