Definitely not feasible to keep drivers on as employees legally. Some issues that come to mind that seem incredibly hard for uber/lyft to enforce but are mandatory for California employees:

* Meal & rest breaks

* Callback pay

* Split Shift premiums

* Reporting premium (if you show up to work, but less work to do than half your scheduled shift)

The only way I see this working is somebody started some "Driver Pool" company that employed drivers fulltime and then Uber/Lyft/Doordash/Grubhub/etc all use that company.

Meal and rest breaks would be easy-ish. Have a button in the driver app to take a rest break available every so often. If it's been too long, force it and don't show rides. Same for meals.

Callback, split shift, and reporting premiums only apply to my knowledge if the shifts are scheduled. I guess it depends if they go towards scheduled shifts over show up whenever, and/or if they can make it 'i'd like to work: yes/no'

It would be like TriNet, but for drivers only

AB5 explicitly allowed for flexible hours- it did not require "shifts" like you're talking about. It made allowances to give drivers the flexibility they want, but Uber and Lyft are upset that it also requires them to provide the option for insurance and that they'd have to pay into the unemployment pool.

They cannot be classified as employees to begin with. AB5 also harmed non-Uber/Lyft drivers, I came across several posts for programming gigs that said that they would not be able to accept offers from programmers in CA due to AB5. It's broken.

It’s going to be impossible to just casually drive for them too.

Service will degrade too. "Your driver will be here in 45 minutes" type of stuff going forward. A huge incentive of using uber/lyft was that in major cities you could literally be picked up in a few minutes of requesting the ride.

They could make changes to their offering (like showing the end location, etc) to avoid this, which they are avoiding.