Lyft enters driverless robotaxi service as riders can hail Waymo cars through its app in Nashville

Which app a Nashville rider opens decides whether availability is a filter. Open Waymo's and you are hailing a Waymo. Open Lyft's and you get matched with one when there is one free ^[3].

Lyft's contribution is the physical end: vehicle readiness, maintenance, infrastructure and depot operations, all run through its wholly owned Flexdrive ^[2]. Those are fixed assets and hourly people. What they earn depends on how many paid trips each car completes in a day. TechCrunch's account does not include financial terms, fleet size or utilization figures ^[14].

Two structures are possible for a fleet-services contract. One pays an availability fee per vehicle per day, and demand risk stays with the AV developer. The other pays per completed trip, and the fleet operator takes utilization risk it cannot influence while the developer's own app has first call on the cars ^[3].

Lyft did not arrive at this position cheaply. The company spent four years and millions of dollars on its own stack inside its Level 5 division ^[5], then sold the unit to Toyota's Woven Planet Holdings for $550 million in 2021 ^[6]. That program therefore began around 2017 ^[15]. Lyft had put other people's AVs on its app before, with Aptiv, now Motional, in Las Vegas, May Mobility in Atlanta, Baidu in London and Waymo in Phoenix ^[7]. Nashville is the first to carry commercial driverless service with no human operator behind the wheel, according to TechCrunch ^[4].

Jeremy Bird, Lyft's executive vice president of growth, runs the international, luxury and AV plans ^[8]. "I think next year what you'll see is more diversification of that," he said, adding, "I think next year will be a big year for us" ^[9]. He gave no timing and no locations for more robotaxis on the Lyft app ^[13]. On choosing markets, Bird said: "Is it a market where AVs are already open regulatorily, or that would put that market up higher on our list of the places we want to go?" ^[12]

The record supports one half of the fleet-layer argument. Lyft can now sell a driverless ride without paying for autonomy a second time ^[6], and what it brought to the table is depot capacity and maintenance labor ^[2]. The payment terms are private, so this partnership cannot settle whether that layer is the profitable end of a robotaxi ^[14]. The two questions to carry into your own version of the deal: who sets allocation, and which unit you get paid on. In Nashville, the Lyft app gets a car when one is available ^[3].