Lyft starts Nashville robotaxi hub for Waymo fleet

• Longer term, riders in Nashville will be able to hail a Waymo on the Lyft app, too.

Driving the news: Lyft said Wednesday that Flexdrive has begun construction in Nashville of "one of the most sophisticated autonomous vehicle fleet management facilities ever built."

• The 80,000-square-foot depot will service, charge and maintain Waymo's AVs starting this fall.
• Flexdrive is hiring more than 70 full-time technicians, operations managers, fleet coordinators and maintenance specialists, many of them Lyft drivers.

Zoom out: Flexdrive began in 2016 as a fleet management company and found a niche renting cars to rideshare drivers who didn't own a car.

• Today, it has 130 employees and manages about 15,000 vehicles at 24 locations across North America.

Lyft acquired Flexdrive for $20 million in February 2020, as part of a broader strategy to develop its own robotaxis, Flexdrive CEO John Parks tells Axios.

• "One of the driving components of the Flexdrive acquisition was if AVs were going to be part of our rideshare future, we believed at the time we needed to manage the fleets in-house," he said.
• Lyft abandoned its AV development effort but tapped Flexdrive's expertise to improve operations and optimize fleet uptime.

• "Now in 2026, we're reaping the rewards of that foresight," Parks said.

The intrigue: Uber, Lyft's biggest rival, is spending $100 million to build fleet management hubs in three cities.

• Although Lyft is one-third the size of Uber, Flexdrive might turn out to be its secret weapon in the global AV race.

What to watch: Flexdrive is already scouting AV depot locations in Europe as Lyft and China's Baidu prepare to launch robotaxis there later this year.