In July, Lucid, Uber, and Nuro announced a massive robotaxi deal that would see the deployment of 20,000 autonomous vehicles in the US over the next six years. But every journey begins with a single step, and today Lucid announced the delivery of the first Gravity SUV to Nuro for retrofitting.
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. But this process was unique to the engineering prototype; eventually, the retrofitting will take place on Lucid’s assembly line ahead of deployment.
The prototype is now at Nuro’s Santa Clara facility, where the company’s engineers are integrating the Nuro Driver software and beginning testing and validation. The companies intend to deploy their first road-ready robotaxi on Uber’s ridehailing network sometime next year.
Delivering the first vehicle for testing is an important milestone, but the companies have a long way to go before we start to see any driverless Lucid Gravity SUV’s on the road in any significant numbers.
In many ways, the size of this deal — “a minimum” of 20,000 vehicles, but expected to be “much, much more,” Nuro’s executives have said — recalls some of the early promises from autonomous vehicle developers about tens of thousands of vehicles on the road in just a few short years. Those early assumptions turned out to be way off, and most companies are still struggling to deliver even just a few self-driving cars.
