In July, Lucid, Uber , and Nuro announced a massive robo-taxi deal that envisions deploying 20,000 autonomous vehicles in the U.S. over the next six years. But every journey begins with a single step, and today Lucid announced the delivery of its first Gravity SUV to Nuro for conversion.
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The vehicle was built at Lucid’s factory in Casa Grande, Arizona, and then transported to the automaker’s headquarters in Newark, California. There, a team from Nuro installed the sensors and other hardware for autonomous driving. This process was unique to the engineering prototype; ultimately, the conversion will take place on Lucid’s assembly line before deployment.
The prototype is now at Nuro’s Santa Clara facility, where the company’s engineers are integrating the Nuro Driver and beginning testing and validation. The companies plan to deploy the first road-ready robo-taxi on ridehailing sometime next year.
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Delivering the first vehicle for testing is a major milestone, but the companies have a long way to go before we start seeing significant numbers of driverless Lucid Gravity SUVs on the roads.
In many ways, the size of this deal — “at least” 20,000 vehicles, but expected to be “much, much more,” according to Nuro executives — is reminiscent of some of the early promises from self-driving car developers of tens of thousands of vehicles on the road in just a few years. Those early assumptions turned out to be far from reality, and most companies are still struggling to deliver even a few driverless cars.
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Today, Waymo operates fewer than 2,000 vehicles in a handful of markets as part of a commercial robo-taxi service. Tesla has a few dozen “robotaxi” (which aren’t exactly real robotaxi, as they still have security guards) in a small part of Austin, Texas. The rest are still in beta and not open to the public — including its driverless trucks, which have their own problems.
