As Waymo joins Lyft, a 72-person depot hints at limits of new jobs for displaced drivers

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 ^[11]. 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 ^[11]. He also misses the small-business side of contracting, and says he would eventually like to own an autonomous vehicle himself ^[12]. 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 ^[8], and Nashville is one metro out of the 14 Waymo runs in ^[3]. Lyft says it has hundreds of thousands of US drivers ^[4]. Against that denominator, half of 72 is 36 former drivers placed ^[9][10], 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 ^[15]. 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 ^[19].

Jeremy Bird, Lyft's EVP of global growth, describes the Waymo supply as rider upside: more choice, more vehicles on the platform, lower fares ^[13]. 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 ^[6][5].

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 ^[17], 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 ^[18], 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 ^[10][4]. DC supplies hundreds against 3,200 ^[15]. 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.