A few months ago, SoftBank-backed autonomous driving startup Nuro became one of the most discussed companies in the robotaxi industry after securing hundreds of millions of dollars in investment from ride-hailing giant Uber.
The investment came alongside a partnership announced with Lucid Motors under which Uber plans to deploy Lucid Gravity vehicles equipped with Nuro’s Level 4 autonomous driving technology.
Aimed at several countries worldwide, the program will begin in the US late next year.
Late last month, Lucid delivered its first engineering prototype to Nuro for testing, marking an initial step toward the eventual robotaxi fleet that will operate exclusively on Uber’s platform.
Nuro, which counts SoftBank, Chipotle, and Toyota’s Woven Capital among its early investors, will be responsible for integrating the autonomous systems into Lucid’s vehicles.
The prototype was built at Lucid’s plant in Arizona, before being transported to the Newark, California headquarters. There, Nuro’s engineers installed the sensors and other self-driving hardware.
The program phase is scheduled to begin late next year, with Uber set to decide in which “major US city” the service will debut.
As part of the partnership, Uber invested $300 million in Lucid and placed an order for at least 20,000 Gravity SUVs to be delivered over the next six years.
While the Gravity’s average selling price in the US is around $120,000 — according to the company’s interim CEO — Lucid hasn’t disclosed the pricing structure agreed with Uber for the fleet order.
In August, a month after the partnership was announced, Nuro said it had raised $203 million in a new funding round that included Uber and Nvidia.
The company said the fresh capital would support “the scaling of Nuro’s AI-first autonomous technology and the growth of its commercial partnerships.”
Just days after the deal was unveiled, Nuro said it had completed installation of Level 4 autonomous systems on its first Lucid-based robotaxi — a Gravity SUV — in under two months.
On July 17, the same day the partnership was announced, Lucid said its first robotaxi prototype was already operating autonomously on a closed circuit at Nuro’s Las Vegas proving grounds.
While Nuro hasn’t disclosed many details about the facility, the company opened the test site in late 2021 in Las Vegas, specifically designed for developing and validating autonomous driving technologies.
“We can test across commercial, residential, and mixed-use scenarios, and we can adjust the course to reflect real-world data gathered by our fleet,” the company said in a statement.
Nevada was the first US state to legalize autonomous vehicle testing in 2011 with the passage of AB 511, which allowed self-driving vehicles to operate on the highways.
At its closed track, Nuro recreates critical scenarios to ensure its self-driving system, known as the Nuro Driver, can safely manage complex environments.
Test cases include pedestrians emerging from occluded areas at night, unpredictable cyclists, construction zones, traffic signal outages, sudden merges, and narrow or altered road markings.
“We use a mix of static obstacles, moving platforms, and dynamic actors to test edge cases under controlled conditions,” Nuro says.
The size of Uber’s investment in Nuro hasn’t been disclosed.
Nuro President Dave Ferguson said only that “Uber is investing in Nuro in a standard equity stake,” adding that while Nuro “wouldn’t mind” sharing more details, “there’s more sensitivity in other quarters,” referring to Uber.
Lucid’s interim CEO Marc Winterhoff recently said the company aims to deliver significantly more Gravity vehicles than the 20,000 currently committed.
“Twenty thousand [units] is a good number. But at the same time, when you look at the details of the agreement, it’s over six years. It’s not that big of a number,” Winterhoff said. “We want that number to be much bigger than that.”
