Lucid Motors‘ interim chief executive Marc Winterhoff said Tuesday that the company’s robotaxi deal with Uber and Nuro is only the beginning of a major autonomous vehicle strategy.
Speaking at Cantor Fitzgerald’s Global Technology and Industrial Growth Conference in New York alongside the Chief Financial Officer Taoufiq Boussaid, Winterhoff detailed how the three-way partnership started.
The appearance came two days before Lucid’s first-ever Investor Day, scheduled for March 12 — also in New York.
Deal’s Origin
Uber, Winterhoff said, set out to identify automotive manufacturers capable of standing up a robotaxi within 18 months — from mid-2025 to the end of 2026 — and selected Lucid because of its vehicle architecture.
“They scanned the market, and then they, in the end, chose us,” the interim CEO said. “We have an all-four-ready vehicle where most of the underpinnings are already there. You almost like put this tiara for Nuro on top, and off you go.”
He said the integration moved quickly after the collaboration was agreed.
“After seven weeks, when we aligned on the collaboration, we had the first car running, already driving autonomously in a testing site in Las Vegas,” Winterhoff said.
He added that all engineering testing vehicles had since been delivered and that the program remained on track to debut in late 2026.
A Drop of Water
Boussaid was blunt about how Lucid views the scale of the initial commitment.
Asked to quantify the partnership’s economics, the CFO confirmed the structure — 20,000 vehicles over six years, with Lucid providing the vehicle and handling part of the integration — but immediately pushed back on the 20,000 as a limit.
“Obviously, 20,000 over six years is a drop of water for us,” Boussaid said.
“So I mean, we do believe that this is the first, it’s a start. So the first 20,000 units will be serving a very limited number of cities,” the CFO added. “There is a reasonable expectation to assume that this figure will grow in the future.”
He described the current commercial structure as minimal on Lucid‘s end.
The vehicles are built to specification on the EV plant in Casa Grande, Arizona, with Nuro’s software applied afterwards.
“Things might evolve in the future,” Boussaid added without revealing further details.
Winterhoff reinforced the point, saying Lucid would not have entered the agreement if 20,000 units were the entirety of the opportunity.
“Quite honestly, we probably wouldn’t have done it if it would only be about 20,000,” he said. “We looked at the whole robotaxi market. Is it now finally becoming real? And I think there’s a growing consensus that we’re now at an inflection point where the technology is finally there.”
He was direct about the technology bar. “We think it takes a little bit more than a camera,” Winterhoff said, in an implicit contrast to camera-only autonomous systems.
Autonomy as a Second Leg
Winterhoff framed robotaxis as one of two strategic pillars for Lucid‘s autonomy ambitions — the other being personally owned vehicles.
For the latter, Lucid is working with Nvidia rather than Nuro. The two tracks are separate and serve different markets.
“For us, autonomy is very strategic, and actually in two dimensions,” he said. “One is personally owned vehicles, because we also will go towards autonomy with personally owned vehicles.”
The robotaxi track, by contrast, is about expanding Lucid‘s addressable market beyond the luxury passenger-vehicle segment.
“Before we were in basically personally owned vehicles in the luxury segment, which is a relatively small market. Now, with the upcoming midsize, it will be significantly larger, but then you add robotaxis to it, then it becomes even larger.”
He described the Uber-Nuro arrangement as a direct expression of Lucid’s technology-licensing strategy applied at vehicle scale.
“When you look at it, what that is right now, this particular arrangement — it is doing exactly that on the largest scale we can. It’s a full car. It’s not only that, it’s also the car is completely built on our production lines.”
“Our plans with Uber and with others go much further than that,” Winterhoff added.
What Comes Next
Lucid‘s Investor Day on March 12 will include a fireside chat between Winterhoff and Andrew Macdonald, President and Chief Operating Officer of Uber, focused on the partnership and the commercial service planned to launch in the San Francisco Bay Area later this year.
Autonomous on-road testing has been underway in the Bay Area since December, led by Nuro using engineering prototypes supervised by human operators.
Production of the final robotaxi variant is pending completion of safety validation, with a commercial service start targeted for late 2026.
The 20,000-unit commitment remains the only publicly confirmed fleet order.
Uber has not disclosed whether it intends to expand beyond that figure.
