Kristina Lara could easily be the poster child for Lyft. A single mother, Lara began driving for the ride-hailing startup in Dallas-Fort Worth to make ends meet. Then she lost her retail job and began driving full-time.

In conversation, she'll tell you again and again how much she loves the Lyft community and the way the company treats its drivers. "I honestly would like for it to become a career," Lara told Mashable.

At least that was the case until this week.

Lyft announced Monday that it has partnered with automotive giant General Motors to create a network of self-driving cars that will one day in the distant (or not-too-distant future) be able to pick up and drop off passengers at the touch of a button on our phones — and likely put many of its drivers out of work.

"It makes me feel like they don't care about the people who work for them on the road, which is surprising when it comes to Lyft," Lara says. After digesting the news, she's feeling more "undecided" about continuing to work with the company.

Lara's concerns highlight the delicate balance that Lyft, which calls itself the "friendly" ride-hailing company, and its billion-dollar competitors must strike as they simultaneously tout their innovative plans for the future — a future that may not involve drivers — while courting the thousands and thousands of drivers needed to work with them now.

Uber, the leader in the ride-hailing market, publicly stated in 2014 that it intends to replace drivers with autonomous vehicles down the road. Yet, Uber has been mostly quiet about these efforts since then, making it easier for drivers to ignore the writing on the wall. Now, with Lyft following suit, trumpeting a major industry partner and even a very official sounding name for the driverless program (The Autonomous On-Demand Network), it suddenly feels more like a reality drivers need to confront.

"The driverless car [announcement] makes it more real that at least the driving part won’t be forever," says Simon, a Boston-based driver for Lyft and Uber who writes often about the industry on his blog and asked to keep his last name private given his work with both companies. "We do see eventually we will get phased out."

Image: Google

Driven to frustration

Uber and Lyft aren't alone in investing in autonomous vehicles. Tesla, Google, Apple and many of the traditional car makers are all said to be moving in this direction. But unlike these other businesses, the two ride-hailing startups account for hundreds of thousands of full-time and part-time drivers in the U.S. alone.

The startups, fond of pitching themselves as job creators to offset regulatory criticisms, must now struggle to maintain that narrative in the face of growing awareness that they are working on technology that could ultimately render many of the jobs they have created obsolete. More than that, they must continue to attract new drivers to fuel their growth until the theoretical self-driving car network becomes reality.

Judging from the initial wave of reactions from drivers we spoke with in interviews or who voiced their opinions across online forums, that just became a harder sell.

"It's a two-faced dynamic," says Harry Campbell, a driver for Uber and Lyft and creator of The Rideshare Guy, a popular blog for drivers in the new industry. Uber, and to a lesser extent Lyft, are "posturing themselves as this huge job creator and then they are inevitably taking all those jobs away with self-driving cars. It's a little uncool."

"When I saw this article I felt bitter because I thought Lyft was going to look out for the drivers but now all they're doing is waiting for these cars to replace us as soon as possible," one driver wrote in a comment on Lyft's Facebook page in response to a post announcing the news. "It's kind of like ditching the guy who drove you to the dance.”

Lyft drivers react to the driverless car announcement on the company's Facebook page.

"Well fk driverless cars are coming and their ain't shit we can do about it," a driver wrote on Uberpeople.net, an anonymous forum for Uber workers. "In the end delivery and transportation drivers will probably go bye bye in the next decade do [sic] to automation."

The reactions vary based primarily on two factors: whether the drivers believe driverless cars are taking over in years, decades, or never and whether those drivers were hoping Uber and Lyft could provide longterm, full-time work, like Lara, or simply odd jobs.

It's widely assumed that the majority of Lyft and Uber drivers are thought to be focused purely on the short-term opportunity. But one survey Campbell's website conducted of more than 400 drivers found that 25% hope to work in the on demand economy "forever."

Job creators now, job destroyers later

When David Plouffe, a former top advisor to President Obama first joined Uber in 2014 as head of policy and strategy, he quickly established the company's spin: job creation.

"As Uber succeeds like I believe it can, it will spur the creation of hundreds of thousands of small businesses and directly create millions of jobs," Plouffe said at the time, by way of introduction.

Just months before, however, his boss, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick unabashedly explained why the company would eventually nix its drivers in favor of driverless vehicles.

"The reason Uber could be expensive is because you're not just paying for the car — you're paying for the other dude in the car," Kalanick said in May, 2014. "When there's no other dude in the car, the cost of taking an Uber anywhere becomes cheaper than owning a vehicle."

"Uber will cut the drivers out of this picture as soon as it's convenient for them," says Steven Hill, author of Raw Deal: Raw Deal: How the 'Uber Economy' and Runaway Capitalism Are Screwing American Workers. "No one should have any expectation that this company will do otherwise."

Travis Kalanick, CEO of Uber, seen here in 2012. Image: Flickr, TechCrunch

Sources close to Uber and Lyft all stressed that they are simply going along with the broader direction of the industry and that any large-scale shift to a self-driving fleet is "a long ways off." One Lyft source went so far as to suggest it's really technological change and legislative policies that will put drivers out of work, not, you know, Lyft itself.

There's currently talk of these startups offering vocational training options for drivers or transitioning some to other theoretical roles, but for now the focus is purely on making it easier and more enticing for drivers to just drive — while they're needed.

"Autonomous driving technology has the potential to drastically reduce deaths in cars and make transportation even more affordable," a spokesperson for Uber said in a statement to Mashable. "That's an exciting future and one Uber intends to be part of, but that transition for technical, regulatory and adoption reasons, at scale, will take some time. In the meantime our focus is providing flexible work opportunities for as many people in the world as possible."

Representatives for Lyft did not immediately respond to our request for comment.

What makes this whole scenario unusual, according to industry watchers, is that Uber and Lyft are simultaneously creating the jobs and laying the groundwork to disrupt themselves with technology that makes those jobs obsolete.

"Historically, those kinds of disruptions have tended to come from different companies," says Erik Brynjolfsson, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and director of MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy. "It wasn’t the stage coach companies that developed the automobile that replaced the stage coach drivers."

That, of course, ended up being bad news for the stage coach companies in all respects except one: they didn't have to take all the blame when their careers were rendered obsolete. Uber and Lyft are swiftly cannibalizing the taxi industry only to potentially cannibalize the on-demand ride-hailing market they replaced it with, leaving drivers high and dry.

Asked how he would explain the switch to driverless cars to Uber's fleet in 2014, Kalanick said simply: "Look, this is the way of the world, and the world isn't always great."