Waymo is no longer an Uber-only ride inside a rideshare app. Lyft flipped the switch on Tuesday, letting riders in Nashville be matched with a Waymo autonomous vehicle when they hail a standard ride — the first US market where the same driverless fleet is dispatchable from two competing rideshare networks at the same time.
How the Nashville match works
Eligible Lyft riders inside a 60-square-mile zone that covers downtown Nashville, Broadway, North Nashville, Germantown, East Nashville, Midtown and South Nashville are offered a Waymo pickup at no additional charge when their trip fits Waymo's service area. Customers can opt out or decline a driverless ride. Standard, Priority Pickup, Wait and Save, and Extra Comfort tiers are all eligible. Waymo continues to accept direct hails through its own app.
Flexdrive builds Nashville's autonomous depot
Lyft's wholly-owned subsidiary Flexdrive is standing up a purpose-built AV depot with charging, maintenance and vehicle-service infrastructure that opens in October. It's the operational half of a partnership Lyft and Waymo announced a year ago, and the first place Flexdrive has taken on end-to-end management of a Waymo fleet. Flexdrive already runs 15,000-vehicle rideshare pools across North America, giving Waymo an alternative to the Avis and Moove operator model it uses in Dallas, Phoenix and Miami.
Where this pressure lands
The move is a direct challenge to Uber's aggressive AV alliance strategy, which had held Waymo integration inside Uber's app in Austin, Atlanta and Phoenix. Lyft shares surged on the news. Nashville also lands the day Waymo continues to scale its 11-city footprint, riding on a $16B war chest raised earlier this year. With PlusAI heading to SPAC public markets and delivery drones going mainstream, hybrid human-driver plus AV rides look like the fastest route to positive robotaxi economics.
Reporting based on coverage from Lyft press release, Bloomberg and TechCrunch.