Lucid kicks off its Nuro-Uber robotaxi deal with delivery of first vehicle

In July, Lucid, Uber, and Nuro announced a monolithic robotaxi deal that would spot the deployment of 20,000 autonomous vehicles successful the US implicit the adjacent six years. But each travel begins with a azygous step, and contiguous Lucid announced the transportation of the archetypal Gravity SUV to Nuro for retrofitting.

The conveyance was built astatine Lucid’s mill successful Casa Grande, Arizona, and past transported to the automaker’s office successful Newark, California. There, a squad from Nuro installed the sensors and different hardware for autonomous driving. But this process was unsocial to the engineering prototype; eventually, the retrofitting volition instrumentality spot connected Lucid’s assembly enactment up of deployment.

The prototype is present astatine Nuro’s Santa Clara facility, wherever the company’s engineers are integrating the Nuro Driver bundle and opening investigating and validation. The companies mean to deploy their archetypal road-ready robotaxi connected Uber’s ridehailing web sometime adjacent year.

Delivering the archetypal conveyance for investigating is an important milestone, but the companies person a agelong mode to spell earlier we commencement to spot immoderate driverless Lucid Gravity SUV’s connected the roadworthy successful immoderate important numbers.

In galore ways, the size of this woody — “a minimum” of 20,000 vehicles, but expected to beryllium “much, overmuch more,” Nuro’s executives person said — recalls immoderate of the aboriginal promises from autonomous conveyance developers about tens of thousands of vehicles connected the roadworthy successful conscionable a fewer abbreviated years. Those aboriginal assumptions turned retired to beryllium mode off, and astir companies are inactive struggling to present adjacent conscionable a fewer self-driving cars.

Today, Waymo is operating little than 2,000 vehicles in a fistful of markets arsenic portion of a commercialized robotaxi service. Tesla has a fewer twelve “robotaxis” (that aren’t rather existent robotaxis, arsenic they inactive person information monitors) in a tiny portion of Austin, Texas. The remainder are inactive successful beta and inactive not unfastened to the nationalist — including the self-driving trucks, which person had their ain problems.