July 18, 2025 - Uber Expands AV Footprint With Lucid and Nuro

This is the Telemetry Transportation Daily for July 18, 2025 and I'm Sam Abuelsamid, Vice President of Market Research for Telemetry.

A decade ago, Uber was a startup burning through billions of dollars a year in venture capital to connect drivers with riders in a modern take on the taxi business. As the hype around automated driving was reaching a fever pitch, Uber decided to jump in and try to create its own system to power robotaxis and trucks, eliminating the need to pay drivers. Just as it had done with most of its business up to that point, Uber cut corners and skirted the rules in a rush to try to beat Waymo, Cruise, Argo and Tesla. That ultimately didn't work out and led to the first fatal crash of an AV and eventually Uber quitting that part of the business. 

But Uber never entirely gave up on AVs even as many companies struggled and went under. Uber maintained investments in companies such as Aurora and has partnered with many others. Now in 2025, Uber is rapidly becoming the go-to company for AV operations globally. Waymo robotaxis are running on Uber in multiple US cities. Uber is working with China's Baidu and WeRide, and this week has announced a collaboration with Lucid and Nuro. Nuro was launched by a couple of former Waymo engineers to focus on automated last-mile delivery. When that proved to be a problematic and costly business,  Nuro turned its focus to just maturing its automated driving system. Uber is now investing $300 million into Nuro and Lucid to produce robotaxis based on the Lucid Gravity and powered by the Nuro Driver. The goal is to commercially deploy Nuro-Lucid robotaxis in a US city in 2026, eventually growing to deploy at least 20,000 vehicles over the next six years. 

Uber has learned that it doesn't need to create the driver; just provide the enabling platform to connect riders with vehicles as conveniently as possible and take a share of every fare. 

Thanks for listening.