Uber Technology has teamed up with Saudi Arabia-backed electric vehicle maker Lucid Motors and US robotics company Nuro to launch a global robotaxi programme, as the race towards self-driving transport accelerates.
San Francisco-based Uber will be making “multi-hundred-million dollar investments” in both Lucid and Nuro for the robotaxis, with the first service to be launched in a “major US city” in the latter part of 2026, Uber said on Thursday.
Uber plans to use at least 20,000 Lucid vehicles equipped with the level-4 Nuro Driver platform through six years, it said. The first Lucid-Nuro robotaxi prototype is already operating autonomously on a closed circuit in Las Vegas.
Level 4 refers to the second-highest of the six levels of vehicle autonomy, which run from 0 to 5, in which vehicles do not require human intervention under most circumstances. Level 5, the highest, requires no human attention and vehicles under this status may not even have steering wheels or pedals.
Nuro Driver is able to “mimic safe natural driving behaviour, integrating an end-to-end AI model with reliable safeguards for precision and reliability”, according to its website.
“Autonomous vehicles have enormous potential to transform our cities for the better,” Dara Khosrowshahi, chief executive of Uber, said.
Driverless, or autonomous, vehicles, are seen as the future of transport, and major companies are racing to make advancements in its technologies, trying to perfect their platforms.
These vehicles, in which billions of investments have been poured into, are meant to support the sustainable transport agenda countries are aiming for.
However, there has been a lot of debate on when fully autonomous vehicles will become roadworthy.
A number of reports have shown that it may take quite a while, with a 2023 study from GlobalData suggesting it would take 20 years to achieve this level of innovation.
The Uber-Lucid-Nuro partnership would be “the start of our path to extend our innovation and technology leadership into this multi-trillion-dollar market”, said Marc Winterhoff, interim chief executive of Lucid, which is backed by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund.
The National has reached out to the companies seeking comment on whether the service would be brought to other regions, including Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
Uber said its operations in 70 countries and an average of 34 million trips per day will give it the resources necessary to “make the benefits of self-driving vehicles accessible … to people everywhere”.
Nuro, meanwhile, will lead the development and validation of comprehensive safety cases across dozens of categories using simulations, closed course testing and supervised on-road testing to verify that the robotaxi will operate safely, it said.
