A former US Postal Service facility near Nashville isn’t housing servers. Instead, it’s been renovated for self-driving cars.
The facility opened on Thursday under the management of Flexdrive, Lyft’s car-rental arm. Later this month, autonomous vehicles from Alphabet-backed Waymo will start pulling in when they need a charge, repairs, a clean, or other maintenance in between shuttling passengers around the Southern city, Lyft said on Friday.
The 80,000-square-foot depot is the latest example of a big investment that companies need to make to get in on the robotaxi game: A place to house and fix the vehicles when they’re not providing rides.
It’s a need that’s drawing real estate investment from ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft, the companies behind the self-driving cars, and other players, such as companies that make EV charging infrastructure.
Lyft’s Nashville facility has “dozens of chargers capable of supporting hundreds of autonomous vehicles,” the company said on Friday. There are also bays to work on cars and secure storage for parts, Lyft said.
The depot is staffed by about 70 full-time employees, the company said, and it sees potential “to create hundreds of jobs in the coming years.”
Many of the people Lyft employs at the new facility used to be Lyft drivers themselves. For ride-hailing drivers, cleaning or servicing self-driving cars at a depot is an opportunity to follow a new career path, Parks told Business Insider in June.
“If you want to get skilled up while you’re working at one of our depots and then go work somewhere else, great,” Parks said.
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