As Waymo joins Lyft, a 72-person depot hints at limits of new jobs for displaced drivers
Half the 72 people at Lyft's Nashville Waymo depot used to drive for Lyft, which makes the fleet-servicing pitch to displaced drivers the rare one you can divide against a driver base of hundreds of thousands.
The Product Desk
What happened
- Lyft began matching Nashville riders with Waymo vehicles inside its own app this week, months after Waymo started serving the city through its own app in April.
- At a provisional Lyft depot in Nashville, staff from its Flexdrive rental arm clean, prep, repair and reposition the Waymos around the city so they are ready for passengers.
- Lyft says 72 people work at that depot and half of them are former Lyft drivers, making the fleet-servicing job the company's concrete offer to the drivers autonomy displaces.
Why it matters
- What it limits constraint Depot rosters are sized by how many vehicles need cleaning, prepping and repositioning, so servicing headcount does not expand with ride demand the way driver supply did, which caps how many driving jobs it can ever absorb.
- What doesn't add up contradiction Lyft's reassurance that AVs leave human driver volumes intact rested on San Francisco data, a market where it sells no driverless rides, so its friendliest evidence comes from the one city that has not run the experiment.
- Who has to decide decision Cities weighing a robotaxi launch now have two shapes of transition offer to demand: a depot payroll a driver has to be hired onto, or the DC-style fund Waymo floated that pays for retraining whether the worker stays in the industry or not.
- Who's exposed exposure The drivers the pitch is aimed at cannot price it: a depot seat has to be applied for and won, and WIRED's account attaches no wage or hours figure to the work.
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Jonathan Baines started driving for Lyft in 2016 to support himself as a singer-songwriter, and he told WIRED that the riders were much of the appeal, closer to hanging out with friends than to working [9]. He is now a fleet operations lead at the Nashville depot, running the crews that clean the Waymos and checking they hit their metrics and standards, and he calls it the best operations job he has had [9]. He also misses the small-business side of contracting, and says he would eventually like to own an autonomous vehicle himself [10]. That is the honest version of the pitch: a specific person who is better off, but still doing arithmetic about what he traded.
The Nashville depot is provisional, with a purpose-built 80,000-square-foot building due in October [4], and Nashville is one metro out of the 14 Waymo runs in [2]. Lyft says it has hundreds of thousands of US drivers [5]. Against that denominator, half of 72 is 36 former drivers placed [8][19], and that is the program's actual scale, not a verdict on it.
Washington, DC, is the one place in WIRED's account where both sides get counted. Waymo has said it expects to employ hundreds of people there if its cars launch, in a market with roughly 3,200 taxi and ride-hail drivers, many of them likely part-time [13]. Read "hundreds" generously at 900 and the servicing roster covers about 28 percent of that driver count; read it at 300 and you get about 9 percent [20]. Waymo did not respond to WIRED's request for comment [17].
Jeremy Bird, Lyft's EVP of global growth, describes the Waymo supply as rider upside: more choice, more vehicles on the platform, lower fares [11]. That argument is coherent, and it is addressed to riders. The driver-facing version is AV-themed forums and appreciation events, plus the assurance that the platform stays a hybrid network of human and robot drivers for a long while yet [7][6].
The figure worth carrying forward is not Nashville's 50 percent. Across Flexdrive's 30 US cities, former drivers are 35 percent of the workforce [15], fifteen points below the showcase site, which runs about 1.4 times the company-wide share [21]. Lyft's Cristian Delgado says hiring former drivers is an effort the company will continue to be "very intentional about" as AVs grow as a share of the fleet [16], a promise about intent, with no hiring count attached to it.
So the thing to ask any operator for is the denominator, city by city: depot seats against active drivers in that metro, on the same page. Nashville supplies 36 seats against a driver base described only as hundreds of thousands [19][5]. DC supplies hundreds against 3,200 [13]. A transition offer that can be divided is one a driver can price before quitting; a driver can only price an offer once it comes with a denominator attached.
What to watch
- Headcount at the 80,000-square-foot Nashville depot when it opens in October, and how many of the added hires come from Lyft's driver base.
- Whether DC regulators make Waymo's proposed revenue-funded training pool a condition of launch, and at what share of revenue.
- Whether Lyft publishes driver earnings from a metro where it does sell driverless rides, rather than from San Francisco.
Clarity's read
What the record supports and how the coverage leans. The claims behind it follow.
Reality
- Evidence55
- Adoption45
- Hype gap+35
- Incentives70
- Confidence60
Perspective Coverage
3 publishers- Builder
- Builder 15%
- Operator
- Operator 53%
- Investor
- Investor 32%
Claim ledger
Ranked by verification strength, evidence, and original report placement.
- [1]
A new partnership integrates Waymo self-driving rides into Lyft's platform, and this week Lyft riders in Nashville who request a ride may be matched with a robot driver. Riders could already request driverless rides through Waymo's own app, where Nashville service started in April.
- [2]
Lyft 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.
- [3]
At Lyft's provisional operations depot in Nashville, employees of its car rental service Flexdrive clean, prep, repair and position Waymos in the right parts of the city so they are ready for passengers.
- [4]
An 80,000-square-foot, purpose-built depot is set to open in Nashville in October.
- [5]
Lyft has hundreds of thousands of US drivers.
- [6]
Lyft, like Uber, insists its platform will be a "hybrid network" for a long while yet, with human drivers working alongside robot ones.
- [7]
Jeremy Bird, Lyft's executive vice president of global growth, says the company has held AV-themed driver forums and driver appreciation events to keep a conversation going with drivers, and that Lyft is embracing the transformation of AVs.
- [8]
Of the 72 people who work at the Nashville depot, half are former Lyft drivers, according to the company.
- [9]
Jonathan Baines began driving for Lyft in 2016 to support himself while working as a singer-songwriter and liked the passengers, saying it felt more like hanging out with friends; he now works as a fleet operations lead overseeing workers who clean the Waymos and hit metrics and standards, and calls it the best operations job he has had.
- [10]
Baines says part of him misses the "small business" aspect of being an independent contractor for Lyft, and that he would eventually like to own his own autonomous vehicle so it can pick up and drop off passengers.
- [11]
Bird says having Waymos on the Lyft platform gives riders more choice, and that more vehicles on the platform means more supply and therefore lower fares.
- [12]
On a recent earnings call, Lyft executives used data from San Francisco, where Lyft does not offer driverless rides, to suggest that the presence of autonomous vehicles will not affect the number of rides human drivers see.
- [13]
In Washington, DC, where Waymo has fought for months to start service, the company has said it expects to employ "hundreds" of people if its cars launch; some 3,200 taxi and ride-hail drivers work in the District, likely many of them part-time.
- [14]
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.
- [15]
Former drivers make up 35 percent of Lyft's Flexdrive workforce, which currently operates in 30 US cities.
- [16]
Lyft spokesperson Cristian Delgado wrote that hiring former drivers "is an effort we will continue to be very intentional about as AVs become a growing part of the fleet."
- [17]
Waymo did not respond to WIRED's request for comment on the story.
- [18]
WIRED's report gives no wage rate or hours figure for the Nashville depot roles, and no count of how many former drivers applied.
- [19]
That is 36 former Lyft drivers working at the Nashville depot.
- [20]
Reading Waymo's "hundreds" of DC jobs at 900 covers about 28 percent of the District's roughly 3,200 taxi and ride-hail drivers; reading it at 300 covers about 9 percent.
- [21]
The Nashville depot's 50 percent former-driver share is 15 percentage points above the 35 percent share across Flexdrive, about 1.4 times the company-wide figure.
- [22]
WIRED reports it may be near-impossible for the new jobs maintaining and directing self-driving cars to neatly replace the driving jobs lost.
Sources
3 independent publishers whose own reporting we read for this story.
- engadget.comLyft is now offering Waymo rides in Nashville
2 articles · September 9, 2026
- insideevs.comWaymo Just Made A New Friend In Nashville, And It's Not Uber
1 article · September 9, 2026
- wired.comLyft Sees a Future for Its Drivers in a Driverless World: Servicing Waymos
2 articles · September 9, 2026
Topics and entities
Topics
- Robotaxis
- AV Fleet Operations
- Automation and driver jobs