Uber picks San Francisco as launch market for its robotaxi plans

Bay Area, prepare for even more driverless cars on your streets.

Next year, the hot spot for self-driving startups like Waymo will be the first market where Uber launches robotaxis in partnership with AV tech company Nuro and EV maker Lucid, the companies announced Wednesday.

“We need to make it work everywhere. Therefore, we said, OK, yes, San Francisco is not the easiest city to drive around in, but that’s where all of our engineers are. That’s also where Nuro is, so we can also concentrate there,” interim Lucid CEO Marc Winterhoff said during a Reuters automotive conference in Detroit Wednesday. “And it’s only the start. We’re not expecting to be there alone, just in San Francisco, for a long period of time.”

In a news release, Uber said the companies have been “updating policymakers and regulators at every level…on our progress and continue to meet their requirements for operation.”

“We’re confident that by the time when we want to roll out—the plan is doing this [by the] end of next year—that everything is done and dusted,” Winterhoff said.

Lucid, Nuro, and Uber announced their plans to roll out 20,000 robotaxis globally over a six-year period. Lucid has delivered several vehicles to Nuro, which is outfitting them with its autonomous system. A fleet of vehicles is already conducting tests on roads in the San Francisco Bay Area. The companies said they expect to have “over 100 robotaxis” in the test fleet “in the coming months.”

Meanwhile, automaker Stellantis announced a new deal with Uber, Nvidia, and Foxconn to launch a robotaxi service, The Verge reported Tuesday. Nvidia and Foxconn will be responsible for the tech, Stellantis will assemble the vehicles, and Uber will deploy them on its ride-hailing network. The plan reportedly calls for launching 5,000 vehicles in the US in the coming years.

Trucking along: AV tech company Waabi this week revealed the autonomous truck it developed with Volvo. Waabi’s autonomous driving system, called the Waabi Driver, was integrated into the Volvo VNL Autonomous truck.

“The future of autonomous trucking hinges on three critical areas: autonomous technology that is safe, scalable, and can deliver on customer needs; hardware that is purpose-built for autonomous operations from the ground up; and a commercial deployment model that solves problems in the supply chain without added friction,” Raquel Urtasun, Waabi’s founder and CEO, said in a statement.

The Waabi Driver employs an end-to-end AI model that the company says “is capable of true generalization.” Waabi, which has a partnership with Uber Freight in addition to Volvo, is working to launch fully driverless operations this year. The company currently has autonomous trucks driving on public roads in Texas with humans on board.

Urtasun said Waabi is working to become the first company to commercialize autonomous trucks without a human safety operator behind the wheel, TechCrunch reported.

In other autonomous trucking news, Aurora announced Tuesday that it’s launching a second, 600-mile driverless delivery route between Fort Worth and El Paso. The company shared that it’s now surpassed 100,000 driverless miles on public roads since launching driverless operations earlier this year from Dallas to Houston. The company later put a human safety observer back in the vehicle.

“Six months out from launch,” Aurora co-founder and CEO Chris Urmson said in a statement, “we’re achieving more industry firsts, expanding quickly, and paving the way to deploy hundreds of trucks next year.”