EVWire brief: Uber, Lucid Motors, and autonomous-tech firm Nuro have partnered to create a premium global robotaxi program for the Uber ride-hailing platform. Uber will invest $300 million in Lucid and make additional “multi-hundred-million-dollar” investments in Nuro, while aiming to put 20,000 or more Lucid Gravity SUVs equipped with Nuro’s Level 4 Nuro Driver™ on the road over six years, beginning with a US pilot late next year.
Details:
A Lucid-Nuro robotaxi is already operating autonomously at Nuro’s Las Vegas proving ground.
Lucid will install the Nuro hardware on its Gravity product line, Nuro software loads when vehicles are commissioned by Uber or fleet partners.
Uber averages 34 million trips per day in 70 countries, and Lucid cites the Gravity’s 450-mile range as key to high utilization.
Nuro co-founder and President Dave Ferguson said “Lucid’s Gravity SUVs are ideal because the vehicles are already equipped with the kind of hardware redundancies required for a Level 3 automated driving system.”
Context:
Uber has been solidifying its clear approach in the autonomous ride-hailing future: they bring the demand, and virtually all AV players provide the autonomous service. While this doesn’t rule out that Uber is going to develop its own robotaxi hardware/software product — in fact we at EVwire think Uber will announce its robotaxi product soon as the technology matures — for now, it is partnering with every autonomous player and their mom. So to speak.
We covered Uber’s partnerships with May Mobility, Momenta, Pony .ai, WeRide and Volkswagen back in May, which already built on some, most notably Waymo’s, partnership. The two offer a “Waymo on Uber” service in Austin and Atlanta. Actually, Uber even called out its (potential) autonomous dream team in its Q4 earnings deck in the Autonomous Vehicles Primer (10-page pdf)
Naturally, Zoox seems unlikely as a partner and Tesla nearly an impossible one, but…
Just a few days ago, Uber also partnered with the Chinese giant Baidu to offer robotaxi services outside China and the USA, which will bring thousands of Baidu’s autonomous vehicles to the Uber app. The first regions are in Asia and the Middle East.
This is, however, the first clear move by Uber we’ve seen in acquiring actual fleets + software as a package here to deploy for its platform. It does not however, come as a surprise, and we might see more of that, considering this quote I surfaced somewhere in the depths of the X platform:
“ Over the long term, we expect fleet owners to emerge to own and manage the vehicles, while the other fixed assets (depots, charging infra, parking etc.) could be owned by REITs. In the near term, Uber might make some investments in fleets to kick-start the AV fleets ecosystem.“
When it comes to Nuro, you might have heard about this autonomous vehicle startup instead in a whole other autonomous format — the low-speed, on-road delivery bots which it developed until last year. I mean these fellas:
The company pivoted and set out to license its autonomous vehicle technology to automakers and mobility providers, like ride-hail and delivery companies. This seems to be the name of the game for quite a few autonomous startups these days. Nuro raised $106M in Series E back in April this year and has raised $2.2B total, not including the current Uber investment.
Back to the partnership at hand — here are some quotes:
❝Autonomous vehicles have enormous potential to transform our cities for the better, and this partnership is how we bring that future to millions of riders.❞
❝This investment from Uber further validates Lucid’s platform as ideal for autonomous vehicles and opens a multi-trillion-dollar market for us.❞
We believe this partnership will demonstrate what’s possible when proven AV technology meets real-world scale. Nuro has spent nearly a decade building an AI-first autonomy system that’s safe, scalable, and vehicle-agnostic, proven through five years of driverless deployments across multiple U.S. cities and states.”
There’s also a short b-roll video showcasing the Gravity running on Nuro’s tech:
Uber, Lucid Motors, Nuro have partnered to create a premium global robotaxi program.
Uber will invest $300M in Lucid and similar into Nuro, while aiming to put 20,000 or more Lucid Gravity SUVs equipped with Nuro’s Level 4 Nuro Driver™ on the road over six years.
— #EV Wire (#@theevwire)
1:13 PM • Jul 24, 2025
DIG DEEPER: Find how the robotaxi contenders compare in the public markets in our EV Stock Tracker’s Robotaxi category.
