Today’s post comes from David Moss, a former LiDAR salesman and independent AV tester who has extensively tested autonomous vehicles from companies including Tesla, Waymo, and Zoox. He also completed a 12,961-mile, zero-intervention coast-to-coast drive using Tesla’s Full Self-Driving software and regularly shares his experiences testing and comparing autonomous driving systems on his YouTube channel and Twitter account.
Last week, on September 9th, Lyft announced that it would begin offering Waymo rides through the Lyft app in Nashville, Tennessee. Unlike the partnerships between Waymo and Uber in Austin, Texas and Atlanta, Georgia, this is not an exclusive arrangement where riders are required to use Uber to hail a Waymo. In Nashville, riders can use Lyft to get a Waymo while the regular Waymo app also remains available.
With this new partnership launching, I decided to drive to Nashville from Austin, Texas, where I had recently attended and covered the Tesla Cybercab launch press event on September 3rd. I arrived in Nashville late Thursday evening on September 10th and immediately wanted to see how the new Lyft integration worked for myself. Riders in Nashville have already been able to hail a Waymo directly from the Waymo app but I specifically wanted to test out the Waymo on Lyft experience.
As soon as I reached the downtown area, I opened the Lyft app and was greeted with a pop up allowing me to opt into receiving autonomous rides through the platform. That part of the experience was convenient and made it clear that Waymo vehicles were now officially part of the available Lyft ride options in Nashville.
The press release states, “Riders requesting a Standard, Priority Pickup, Wait & Save, or Extra Comfort ride within central Nashville will begin to be matched with a Waymo vehicle at no additional cost through the Lyft app. To be eligible for matching, the route must start and end within the Waymo service area on Lyft covering Downtown/Broadway, North Nashville/Germantown, East Nashville, Midtown, and South Nashville”
This is where the story gets interesting.
Between 11:12 PM that evening and 11:56 PM, I booked 14 different rides through the Lyft app and was matched with a human driver all 14 times rather than a Waymo. I experimented with multiple pickup locations, multiple destinations, and all four of the available booking categories. Since I had my own vehicle with me, I was extremely flexible about where I could start and end each trip. Despite everything I tried, I had zero luck getting matched with a Waymo.
Then I suddenly found myself logged out of the Lyft app and received the message, “Your account has been disabled. Please contact support for more information.”
That was obviously frustrating. I was doing my best not to inconvenience Lyft drivers by canceling within approximately 10 seconds whenever I was matched with a human driven vehicle. I also had about seven years of ride history with Lyft, an active Lyft Pink membership, and was being charged $2 cancellation fees, which I was willingly paying while trying to get matched with the specific type of ride I had traveled to Nashville to experience.
I posted about the situation on my X account, and Lyft replied asking me to send them a direct message with my information. I also contacted Lyft Support through its 24 hour online chat. Through that conversation, I learned that my account had actually been permanently disabled because of my repeated attempts to hail my preferred type of ride.
At that point, I mostly found the entire outcome hilarious. I shared a screenshot of what happened with Waymo engineer Reed Morse, @Reed, who I had followed on X for a while but had never personally messaged before. I assumed that would probably be the conclusion of my Nashville Waymo experiment.
Instead, Reed went out of his way to make some magic happen. He contacted the right person at Waymo, who then communicated with Lyft, and somehow they were able to get my Lyft account restored.
So I went back out very late Friday evening to try again.
At around 1:30 AM, I started requesting rides. After two more unsuccessful attempts, I changed locations again and headed to the Barstool Bar parking lot in downtown Nashville. Finally, at 2:05 AM, I requested an Extra Comfort ride to a nearby downtown hotel about 10 minutes away and successfully got matched with a Waymo.
The Lyft app informed me that I had been paired with a Waymo and asked me to confirm that I was comfortable taking an autonomous vehicle. It also gave me the option to decline and receive a human driven ride instead.
After I accepted, the Waymo arrived in well under five minutes. Once the vehicle arrived, the Lyft app gave me the ability to unlock the vehicle or open the trunk. Interestingly, opening the trunk also unlocked the rest of the vehicle, which was a nice touch.
The ride itself was extremely smooth and was probably my best Waymo experience to date. I have previously ridden in Waymo vehicles in Phoenix, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Austin, and Dallas. I still would not put the driving experience quite on the same level as the Tesla Cybercab, but it was definitely excellent.
When I reached my destination and opened the passenger door, I was pleasantly surprised to find that the trunk had automatically opened as well.
I then needed to return to my own vehicle, so I booked another Extra Comfort ride. This time I was instantly paired with the exact same Waymo. It appeared to have simply circled the block before returning, and once again it arrived in well under five minutes.
The second ride was another positive experience. During the trip, we encountered emergency vehicles passing nearby. The Waymo recognized what was happening, moved over appropriately, and ultimately did everything it was supposed to do. The reaction was slightly jerky, but from a safety and decision making standpoint, it handled the situation correctly.
Overall, the actual Waymo rides were great and felt safe, smooth, and polished. The process of trying to book one through Lyft, however, was a completely different story.
If your main goal is simply to ride in a Waymo while visiting Nashville, I would definitely recommend using the Waymo app instead. Still, after everything that happened, from 16 failed attempts and getting permanently disabled by Lyft to eventually having my account restored and finally getting two Waymo rides back to back at 2 AM, the entire experience turned into a pretty fun memory.
You can watch both of my rides in full, completely unedited and back to back, on my YouTube channel @DavidMossAI today.
-David Moss
I watched this previously on David's YT channel. Wanted to check in here. Lyft Nashville is an interesting market. Nashville is the current ragged edge for Autonomy due to the VERY modest population density coupled with a VERY LOW population density compared to everywhere else Waymo has explored. Most places that have become launch cities for autonomous services have the 'right density' and a reasonable deadhead range I would think a tight partnership with Lyft improves the economics greatly in this case. I have that only knowing the urban core/metro population, the core density and the deadhead range is a remarkable predictor of where Waymo will go next.
I cut Lyft a bit of slack about someone ordering and canceling 14 rides in a row. A reminder of Uber's campaign in 2014, when 177 Uber employees deliberately ordered and canceled 5,560 fake rides over a 10-month period.
Your situation was not what Lyft's agreement with Waymo was intended to do, which is to provide a win-win outcome for you, Waymo and Lyft by providing one-stop access to a combined vehicle fleet.
I'm not surprised that early in this integration, Lyft driver supply may outweigh Waymo availability in a particular neighborhood and time of day. Of course, if you really were determined to take a Waymo ride, you would have ordered one on their app. Instead, you created an annoying inconvenience for Nashville Lyft drivers.