Leader in robotaxi technology Waymo said on Wednesday that its autonomous vehicles will begin carrying Nashville, Tennessee’s, passengers starting next year. This marks a strategic change as the company allies with Lyft, getting the first permit to test in NYC, and leaving behind its earlier ride-hailing industry partnership with Uber.
Initially, the plan for Nashville calls for restricting robotaxi ride requests to Waymo’s Ride-Hiling app, with Lyft’s integration scheduled for later this year. Waymo guarantees that its robotaxis will be available through the two most well-known ride-hailing services in the United States by partnering with Lyft in Tennessee’s largest city.
Waymo has already been putting robotaxis through Uber’s app in cities including Austin, Texas, and Atlanta. Tesla, the electric vehicle company, has been testing a restricted driverless service in Austin meantime with the goal to achieve an audacious vision CEO Elon Musk has been promoting for ten years now. Waymo’s robotaxis will first be accessible in only one city, but their appearance on Lyft’s app could greatly help the company in its comeback from the epidemic-related limits that greatly affected ridership.
Uber, by contrast, has bounced back faster from the epidemic, a comeback seen in its financial results and market value, which has tripled since late 2019. Lyft’s stock value, on the other hand, is still around 50% below its worth at the conclusion of 2019. Lyft hired former Amazon executive David Risher as CEO two years ago to help it recover.
Risher had previously teamed up with May Mobility, which is now providing driverless transportation in Atlanta, in competition to Waymo and Uber. This partnership of Lyft and Waymo is not new. Waymo offered a limited number of rides via Lyft in 2019 during the trial period of its robotaxi service in Phoenix. Waymo, though, ended that partnership more than five years ago when it completed its Phoenix experiments and started to offer driverless rides to all interested customers on its own app.
