Lyft jumps as it gets partnership with Google’s Waymo for Nashville expansion

Google’s Waymo is expanding to Nashville next year, where it will be the first autonomous car service in the area, and it’s partnering with Lyft to do so.

Shares of Lyft surged 9.3% shortly after markets opened. Competitor Uber, which has a similar partnership with Waymo in other cities, fell 3.4%.

Over time, Waymo says it expects to operate “hundreds” of vehicles in Nashville, where it’s been testing since March.

Lyft will be responsible for fleet management, including vehicle maintenance and depot operations. Customers will initially hail rides through Waymo’s app, and will be able to be matched with a Waymo through Lyft’s app as well later in 2026.

Waymo currently operates more than 2,000 autonomous taxis in five US markets, with plans to move into six more markets, including Nashville, while testing in about a dozen others. Waymo is now doing “hundreds of thousands” of paid, fully autonomous rides per week, which the company says is up from the quarter of a million rides per week it was delivering earlier this year.

Back in 2019, Waymo conducted a small-scale pilot with Lyft in Phoenix, but as of today it had no active partnerships with Lyft before this Nashville venture. Waymo has a similar partnership with Lyft competitor Uber in Austin and Atlanta.

Lyft, meanwhile, has partnered with Mobileye to launch a self-driving service in Dallas next year. Lyft CEO David Risher recently told Sherwood News, “There aren’t enough self-driving cars and there’s too much demand, and the demand is growing.”

General Motors-owned Cruise announced an expansion to Nashville in 2023 that never came to fruition.

Nashville is also where Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s Boring Company is expanding its underground tunnels to transport people from downtown to the airport, it recently announced. Like in Las Vegas, the Boring Company plans to have human drivers shuttle passengers through the tunnels in a fleet of Tesla vehicles.

Tesla’s own self-driving service is limited to about 30 vehicles in Austin. It offers a more traditional ride-hailing service with a person in the driver’s seat monitoring a car using self-driving tech in the Bay Area.

Musk says Tesla will be able to scale its autonomous driving much more quickly than Waymo, which he doesn’t consider to be real competition, because Tesla can theoretically add its consumer vehicles currently on the road to its fleet. “I don’t see anyone being able to compete with Tesla at present,” Musk said on a company earnings call earlier this year. “At least as far as I’m aware, Tesla will have, I don’t know, 99% market share or something ridiculous.”

On Tesla’s most recent earnings call, Musk said, “I think we’ll probably have autonomous ride-hailing in probably half of the population of the US by the end of the year.”