Lucid kicks off its Nuro-Uber robotaxi deal with delivery of first vehicle
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.
Introducing our Robotaxi Engineering Fleet.
- Lucid Motors (@LucidMotors) September 24, 2025
Lucid has delivered the first @Uber-exclusive robotaxi engineering vehicle to @nuro for integration with the Nuro Driver.
This marks the beginning of an exciting new chapter-stay tuned. pic.twitter.com/It5rWqFHS2
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 developersabout 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.
Today,Waymo is operating less than 2,000 vehiclesin a handful of markets as part of a commercial robotaxi service.Tesla has a few dozen robotaxis" (that aren't quite real robotaxis, as they still have safety monitors)in a small part of Austin, Texas. The rest are still in beta and still not open to the public - including the self-driving trucks,which have had their own problems.