Nuro Driver

Nuro was founded in 2016 by Dave Ferguson and Jiajun Zhu, two engineers from Google's self-driving programme, and for most of its life it was known for something with no seats at all: the R1, R2 and R3 delivery pods, low bubble-shaped vehicles that carried groceries rather than people and that earned the first US exemption for a purpose-built driverless vehicle. The pivot is what makes the company interesting now. Rather than operating a fleet, Nuro licenses the Nuro Driver — its autonomy stack — to partners who own and run the vehicles themselves. The deal that validated that model was announced with Lucid and Uber. Uber has licensed the Nuro Driver, and Uber together with third-party fleet partners will own and operate the cars; Uber has committed to invest USD 500 million in Lucid and to buy a minimum of 35,000 robotaxi-ready Lucid vehicles over six years, with the partners describing a deployment of 20,000 or more Lucid-Nuro robotaxis across dozens of US and international markets. Uber also invested about USD 500 million directly in Nuro. Neither Waymo nor Zoox sells its driver this way; Nuro's bet is that the autonomy stack is the product and the fleet is somebody else's balance sheet. The vehicle is the Lucid Gravity, an electric SUV rated at up to 450 miles of range, fitted with high-resolution cameras, lidar and radar giving 360-degree coverage — sensors built into the body plus a roof-mounted Halo module — and computing on NVIDIA DRIVE AGX Thor. The trio unveiled the robotaxi at CES on 5 January 2026 and confirmed that autonomous on-road testing led by Nuro had begun the previous month. In May 2026 Nuro received a California permit to test the Lucid Gravity vehicles driverless on public roads. First public rides are planned for a major US city late in 2026, exclusively through the Uber app, with a premium service in Houston in 2027. So the Nuro Driver has not yet carried a paying passenger without a person aboard. What it has is the largest committed vehicle order in the robotaxi business and a customer that also happens to be the world's largest ride-hailing platform.

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