They were Lyft drivers. Now they are cleaning up Waymos.

Former Lyft drivers cede the roads to robots and help the machines get five-star ratings.

In Nashville, Lyft’s Flexdrive subsidiary plans to open its largest vehicle cleaning and maintenance depot yet — for service — in October Waymo robotaxis. The 80,000-square-foot facility will employ approximately 70 full-time employees, about half of whom previously drove for Lyft. The situation offers the first glimpse of what AI can benefit millions of workers: eliminating a number of jobs and creating new work around the takeover of machines.

Jonathan Baines drove for Lyft for about a decade to support himself while pursuing a career as a pop and soul singer-songwriter. Now, like one leading fleet operations at Waymo’s existing depot in Nashville — which Lyft acquired in June — he helps direct robotaxi traffic through the facility and determine if the cars are ready to return to passengers.

“The general idea is to keep cars moving through,” Baines said.

For him, the best part of the job is that it gives him experience in an industry that he expects will be part of the future. “It’s new. It’s innovative,” Baines says. “This is going to give me opportunities within the AV industry, here within Lyft and Flexdrive, that I wouldn’t have otherwise.”

Likewise, Chauncey Thompson, who played college basketball and later spent about a decade in the rental car industry Before driving for Lyft, he says he prefers being a fleet management employee to a driver. He mentions the opportunity to work with new technology, consistent work hours and the camaraderie of working in a team. (Lyft arranged the interviews with Thompson and Baines.)

Flexdrive’s internal technology tracks diagnostics and maintenance and alerts the company when cars need maintenance, but employees are still responsible for visually inspecting the vehicles, cleaning and charging them, and flagging anything that needs extra attention. After a storm, Baines may notice mud on a car’s sill panels or a window calibration problem and send it to a technician for further inspection.

Thompson inspects each car, charges it, wipes it down, vacuums it and checks tire pressure. For now, the decision whether a car is clean enough to return to passengers still depends on human judgment.

Thompson’s background also made the transition feel natural. While driving for Lyft, he used his own car, which meant he had to pay close attention to how it looked and whether it was ready for customers. “I wanted my car to look nice on the road and have my tires in perfect condition before I hit the road,” he says.

For Lyft, which sold its self-driving car division in 2021, this work offers another way to participate in autonomous transportation. The Flexdrive unit, which cleans and maintains cars that Lyft drivers rent from the company, is now trying to clean and maintain driverless vehicles. Riders will be able to do that Greetings Waymos via Lyft’s app, in addition to Waymo’s, later this year. That puts Lyft on both sides of the operation: providing the platform through which passengers request rides, and the human and physical infrastructure that keeps the vehicles clean and running.

Flexdrive CEO John Parks says autonomous fleet management is more labor-intensive than the company’s traditional rental operations because work once handled by drivers, who kept their cars for 14 to 16 weeks, now must be handled daily by Lyft.

“Autonomous vehicles can’t clean themselves, they can’t charge themselves and they can’t repair themselves,” Parks said. “Now they’re all coming back to our depot.”

He didn’t share details on relative maintenance time, but noted that robotaxis, which is not limited by a the human driver’s need to sleep or take time offcould travel as much as 100,000 miles per year, compared to around 40,000 miles for a car in Flexdrive’s rental fleet. More kilometers means more charging, cleaning, tire replacement and repairs.

“The big difference is the frequency with which you have to touch the cars,” he says, noting that depot employees charge and clean the robotaxis about two to three times a day, rather than every few months, when Lyft drivers return their rental cars.

What they lost in passing interactions with passengers, they say, they gained in lasting relationships with colleagues.

Flexdrive operates about 15,000 traditional rental cars in 24 markets with only about 100 employees, Parks said. It’s Nashville Waymo Depotbuilt to accommodate a growing fleet, it will employ 70 people. There are currently about 50 Waymos operating in the city, although that number will gradually grow over time.

Some of that work is routine. Other problems require human judgment. A broken charger may need to be fixed; a poorly positioned car can disrupt the flow of the depot. Even as the vehicles move themselves through parts of the facility, Parks says employees still have to notice when something is wrong and figure out what to do next.

The new structure has also changed the organization social experience for the former drivers. While driving, Baines and Thompson came into contact with a rotating group of passengers and had to read people and situations in real time. The depot work is more hidden and repetitive, but both men find it more fascinating.

“I miss driving because I like interacting with people,” Baines says. “But as far as the actual work itself, I like this more.”

Thompson says he’s “definitely less visible” now, though both men still occasionally drive for Lyft. What they lost in passing interactions, they say, they gained in lasting relationships with colleagues and the potential for more career opportunities.

“These are jobs where workers end up working on something more connected to AI“It’s no surprise to me that these workers are feeling much more confident about their future career prospects,” said Daniel Zhao, chief economist at Glassdoor. People, he says, “would rather work on a product that they think is the future.”

The Nashville depot is a small example of a broader phenomenon that economists and labor researchers are trying to measure: AI doesn’t just eliminate jobs. It can also split them up, automating some tasks and transferring others to new employees.

Alexander Alonso, head of knowledge at the Society for Human Resource Management, says the shift from driving to depot work illustrates a more useful way to think about AI and employment. He calls it the ‘redesign of work’.

“The big metric is not just that jobs will be lost,” Alonso said. “It’s: How are jobs changing?”

Research from SHRM shows that change is already happening: 42% of employees expect AI to significantly change their role. Meanwhile, 35% of the skills in current vacancies did not appear in vacancies for the same jobs a year and a half earlier.

But Alonso doesn’t yet see a huge growth in AI-related jobs to offset the jobs that might be lost to AI. “We don’t see a one-for-one replacement,” he says.

SHRM estimates that 22 million U.S. jobs have the technical potential to be displaced by AI and automation by 2030, but after taking into account consumer preferences, regulations, and jobs that combine automatable and non-automatable tasks, the company realistically sees about 8 million jobs at risk.

“The technology may automate one responsibility, but if the organization still needs the person for the other tasks, it doesn’t really save money,” Alonso says.

For its part, Waymo argues that autonomous vehicles can create new jobs without eliminating driving as a viable source of income. The company would not disclose how many people are needed to clean, charge and maintain its national fleet of more than 3,500 vehicles.

Robotaxis may take the driver out of the driver’s seat, but they haven’t taken people away from providing a ride. As it stands now, some of that work is no longer done from the driver’s seat, but increasingly out of the passenger’s field of view.

Rani Molla is a technology journalist with nearly 15 years of experience covering Silicon Valley, AI, labor, and the companies reshaping society.