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# Lyft sold its self-driving unit five years ago, and now it is cleaning Waymo's cars in Nashville
- URL: https://www.businessbagel.com/lyft-enters-the-robotaxi-race/
- Published: 2026-09-15T08:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-15T07:59:59.000Z
- Description: Nashville is the first city anywhere where Waymo's driverless cars take bookings from two competing apps, and Lyft's subsidiary keeps them charged.
- Author: Christian Maidman
- Tags: Companies, Business Bagel News

Lyft spent four years and a great deal of money building a self-driving car, then sold the whole unit to Toyota's Woven Planet for $550 million in 2021 and got on with ride-hailing. Five years later it is back in driverless cars, and its job in them is the charging and the cleaning.

On 9 September, Waymo's fully autonomous vehicles became bookable through the Lyft app in central Nashville. It is the first market anywhere where the same robotaxi fleet can be hailed on two competing apps, and the two companies dispatch from one pool of cars across both networks. Riders asking for a Standard, Priority Pickup, Wait and Save or Extra Comfort trip get matched with a Waymo at no extra charge, provided the route starts and ends inside a service area that covers Downtown, Germantown, East Nashville, Midtown and South Nashville. Anyone who would rather have a person can decline the ride or switch the option off entirely.

## Who does what in the deal

Waymo keeps the parts that look like technology. It owns the cars, the sensors and the software, and it holds the regulatory approvals that let them drive empty. Lyft takes the parts that look like a garage. Its wholly owned subsidiary Flexdrive handles charging, cleaning, inspection and repair, out of a purpose-built depot opening in October that runs to 80,000 square feet. That depot is bringing more than 70 full-time jobs to the city this year, technicians and fleet coordinators mostly, and many of the people filling them used to drive on Lyft.

This is not a side business Lyft invented for the occasion. Flexdrive has been managing high-mileage rideshare cars since its first Atlanta facility in 2016, and now runs 24 sites and roughly 15,000 vehicles across North America. More than a third of its national workforce have been rideshare drivers.

## Why Waymo wanted a second app

Waymo's other big rideshare partner is having a worse year. It ended a three-year pilot with Uber in Phoenix, and Financial Times reporting relayed by Axios and others has it ending exclusivity in Austin and Atlanta and launching its own app in those cities in 2028\. Spreading across more booking apps is how a fleet owner stops depending on any one of them. Lyft is not the only option either: Waymo also uses Avis, Avomo and Moove for fleet work elsewhere.

The scale question sits underneath all of it. Waymo now runs fully driverless in 14 US cities and passed 500,000 paid autonomous rides a week by the end of the first quarter, with a target of a million a week by year end. The Next Web reports it recently paused service in five cities after its vehicles repeatedly drove into floodwater.

Jeremy Bird, Lyft's executive vice president of global growth, told Axios the company wants to prove the model in Nashville and then take it to scale. The service area still stops short of Bellevue, Antioch and Madison.