The Robotaxi Needs Fred

The technician I’ll call Fred heard the click.

I had brought my Artisan Red 2024 Mazda CX-90 mild hybrid to his bay with a complaint I could barely describe. Every time the driver’s door closed, it made a small click. It wasn’t a rattle or a squeak, just a sound that was wrong. Plenty of service departments would have written “could not duplicate” and sent me home. And soon, a lot of cars will roll into bays like his with no driver at all to describe the click.

Fred opened and closed that door until he heard what I heard. Then he kept going until he found the cause: a poor design in the inner door trim. Then he did the part nobody pays him for. He hounded Mazda until they approved a warranty replacement. When the part came, he didn’t like it. He sent it back, and me with it, until the replacement was right. He talks about the car as if she’s ours, his and mine. Until she was right, she was his baby. Fred is my advocate.

Nobody wrote down how Fred got that way. I don’t know myself, and I have never asked who stood next to him when he was learning. There is no line on any ledger for the thousand cars that trained his ear, or for the stubbornness that made him chase a click to its source. His employer counts him as one technician, one bay, so many billable hours. What he actually is, a man who hears what’s wrong and won’t let it go, appears nowhere.

The companies building cars without drivers are about to need a great many Freds. Nobody counts how a Fred gets made, so nobody is making them on purpose. The operators who select people for what they can become, form them under masters, and keep an account of what they learn will run the best depots, and the people inside them will earn more. That’s the argument.

The body without the brain

The car drives itself. Everything else still needs hands.

In October 2026, Lyft’s fleet subsidiary Flexdrive opened an 80,000-square-foot depot in Nashville to charge, clean, inspect and repair Waymo’s driverless cars. Waymo keeps the software and the sensors; Flexdrive keeps the cars ready, as Moove does in Phoenix and Miami and Avis in Dallas. The depot brings more than 70 full-time jobs in its first year: technicians, repair coordinators, maintenance specialists, fleet operations staff. Current and former Lyft drivers get first crack at the interviews, and by April half the roles Flexdrive had filled had gone to people who used to drive.

Strip away the novelty and you will recognize the building. Parts cages. Repair bays. A charging line that has to be sequenced like a paint shop. A depot is a plant whose product is a car ready to leave the gate.

Now picture a Waymo getting sideswiped at a stop light. Nobody inside is hurt, but the car is done for the day. Waymo’s support staff confirm the crash and help the rider hail another car. Someone tows it. Someone in a body shop pulls the door and repairs the panel, and because the sensors live in the bodywork, someone has to recalibrate them before the car can earn again. Every hour that takes, an expensive asset sits. The economics of every mile get decided in that bay, by whoever is standing in it.

Which means the driverless industry is about to learn what every plant manager learns: a building full of people is not the same as a building full of capability.

I have seen this movie

In 2007, Royal Enfield had a problem customers felt twice. The motorcycles were unreliable, and the service was worse. Put those together and you get an enraged customer base.

We fixed the product first, with the Classic and the Thunderbird. Then we went after the promise. We got very sharp about who could carry the brand into towns we would never personally visit: solid businessmen with cash-flow businesses and people on the payroll. One was a local plumbing-supplies man with an ambitious, college-educated son. Every one of them promised, literally, to build a service center and staff it properly. Shaji Koshi, my head of sales and marketing, audited those dealers and service centers relentlessly.

That is exactly what Waymo is doing now: choosing who carries its promise in cities it does not run itself.

And it was not enough.

Read the owner forums from the years that followed and the same complaint keeps returning. The complaint was the person holding the wrench, never the building. One owner who bought in 2007 wrote, more than a decade later, that service in Bangalore had barely moved: centers swamped with bikes and short of skilled hands. A forum regular observed that the best Bullet mechanics had always been independents who ran their own shops and did nothing else. They were Freds. We had not made enough of them.

Lately the threads read better, with honest estimates and test rides before the bill. That is process discipline, and audits enforce process well. What an audit cannot see is whether the technician is getting better at hearing an engine. Looking back, our formation was nowhere near the capability development and certification the work needed. We checked the bays, the headcount and the checklist. We kept no account of the people.

I saw the same pattern again in electric two-wheelers, at Ather and later advising River. The networks grew fast. Owners liked the scooters and grumbled about service.

I remember one customer at a Royal Enfield service center, standing at the window into the bay, watching his bike come apart. He paced. I asked the technician to come out and talk to him. The technician explained why it wasn’t safe to bring him into the bay, told him what he was doing, and came back out twice more with updates. Then he suggested the man go get some lunch. His bike would be washed and waiting when he got back. No audit I ever ran had a line for that.

Where nobody does that, the cost stops being a grumble. In Kalaburagi in September 2024, a 26-year-old mechanic who couldn’t get his new Ola scooter