Nuro, a delivery-focused autonomous vehicle company founded by former Google self-driving engineers, plans to launch a robotaxi service in the United States by partnering with Uber and Lucid, targeting San Francisco as the initial market.

Nuro clarifies that remote assistance is not remote driving but help to resolve vehicle confusion, addressing public concerns about offsite control.

Being a second mover to Waymo, Nuro aims to use Waymo’s early experiences to refine its own robotic taxi technology and operations.

Nuro acknowledges public trust challenges for robotaxis and commits to transparently sharing driving data to demonstrate safety improvements over human drivers.

Nuro plans to combine lessons from its rule-based systems with newer end-to-end learning models to create a safer, more natural driving experience, while building trust through open statistics.

The Uber-Lucid-Nuro arrangement envisions Lucid building Gravity SUVs with Nuro’s sensing and compute stack, Uber owning and operating the fleet and depots, and Uber providing remote assistance support.

This collaboration exemplifies cross-industry coordination among a rideshare network, an automaker, and an autonomous-vehicle company, with a long-term aim to license autonomous tech to other partners and apply it to use cases beyond robotaxis.

Co-founders Dave Ferguson and Jiajun Zhu say Nuro’s approach will enable a broad, immediately useful robotaxi design from day one, rather than a slow, incremental rollout.