Lyft Sees a Future for Its Drivers in a Driverless World: Servicing Waymos

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.