In brief: Lyft and Waymo have announced a new partnership that will bring the latter's autonomous ride-hailing service to Nashville, Tennessee, in 2026. Per the agreement, Lyft will manage Waymo's fleet through its Flexdrive subsidiary. Lyft will be responsible for building an autonomous vehicle facility in the city and handling tasks like depot operations, infrastructure, charging, and even vehicle maintenance.
Riders in the Music City will first have the opportunity to hail a driverless vehicle directly through the Waymo app. Self-driving rides will be added as an option to the Lyft app before the end of the year, we are told. Shares in Lyft are up more than 12 percent on the news. Waymo is not a publicly traded entity; instead, it is a subsidiary of Alphabet.
This is not the first time the two transportation specialists have worked together to bring their tech to consumers. Waymo and Lyft first linked up in mid-2017. A couple of years later, they worked together to deploy a small fleet of self-driving vehicles in the Phoenix area.
Many believe that self-driving vehicles are the future of personal transportation, but the transition has not happened as quickly as some anticipated or perhaps hoped for. Rider safety is of course a major concern, as is the well-being of pedestrians. In 2018, the self-driving movement was essentially paused following the first pedestrian death due to an autonomous vehicle.
Testing eventually resumed and although far from widespread, self-driving vehicles are now more commonplace than ever. Waymo said it has scaled to hundreds of thousands of fully autonomous rides each week across the five major markets it currently operates in: Atlanta, Austin, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and the San Francisco Bay Area. Nashville will soon be the sixth city it serves.
Collectively, Waymo has driven more than 100 million miles autonomously on public roads. According to company data, its self-driving vehicles are much safer than human drivers.
We're still likely decades away from a reality in which autonomous vehicles outnumber those operated by humans, but the path to that eventuality seems clear.
Image credit: Gibblesmash, Chad Morehead