Uber plans to make “multi-hundred-million dollar investments” in both Nuro and Lucid as part of a massive new robotaxi deal that was just announced.
The three companies are linking up to deploy “20,000 or more” robotaxis in the US over the next six years. The vehicles will be Lucid’s new Gravity SUV, equipped with autonomous technology developed by Nuro, and available exclusively on Uber’s app. The fleet will be owned by Uber or a third-party fleet management partner and the first vehicles will launch in as-yet-to-be-determined US city in 2026.
“This is a very, very big deal,” Dave Ferguson, co-founder and president of Nuro, said in an interview. “In terms of the scale and the hard commitments and the meat behind it, it is by far the biggest partnership deal that Uber has announced or done.”
“This is a very, very big deal.”
Uber is investing $300 million in Lucid, a spokesperson for the automaker, Nick Twork, confirmed. The investment in Nuro will be “significantly more than that,” Ferguson said, though he declined to share an exact figure. As part of the deal, Uber will take a seat on Nuro’s board of directors.
Uber’s decision to pour hundreds of millions of dollars in both companies underscores its desire to become a clearinghouse for both electric and autonomous vehicles of all stripes. The ridehail company has said it wants to use its size and scale to aid in the proliferation of autonomous vehicles across the world. It has struck over a dozen deals over the past year with a variety of robotaxi and delivery robot companies, including Waymo.
In choosing the sumptuously designed Gravity as its robotaxi platform, Uber will likely price this particular service in the upper tier like Uber Black. Lucid makes two luxury EVs, the Lucid Air sedan which starts at $69,900, and the Gravity SUV which starts at $79,900. In the current shaky EV market, Lucid is a niche player, delivering just 3,309 vehicles in the second quarter of 2025. The company is majority-owned by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, and it operates an assembly plant in the oil-rich nation.
This is Nuro’s first major licensing deal after pivoting away from designing and building its own self-driving delivery vehicles. The California-based company said last year that licensing its autonomous tech would be its main focus moving forward. Nuro’s current fleet of vehicles, which operates in California and Texas, has traveled over 1 million miles autonomously without any major safety incidents.
Uber’s investment comes at a crucial time for Nuro and Lucid, both of which have struggled with layoffs and other financial difficulties in recent years. Donald Trump’s tariffs, as well as his administration’s move to eliminate Biden-era EV incentives, have put enormous pressure on the auto industry. And self-driving cars have taken longer and proven more costly to develop than initially promised.
But even as most AV investments have dried up, Nuro continues to find financial support. The company is currently valued at $6 billion after raising $106 million in its latest funding round last April. Lucid, which is publicly traded, has a market cap of approximately $7 billion.
Uber’s investment comes at a crucial time for Nuro and Lucid.
Nuro will design the Level 4 autonomous technology to power the robotaxis. Lucid’s workers will install the various sensors and hardware on the Gravity assembly line, after which it’ll be updated with Nuro’s software and commissioned by Uber. Nuro will also develop a safety case “across dozens of categories” using simulation, closed-course testing, and supervised on-road testing. A prototype autonomous Gravity is currently being tested at Nuro’s Las Vegas proving grounds, which Ferguson said took seven weeks to develop.
“That is a real testament to the quality of the engineering on the Lucid side,” he said. “They designed these platforms to be L3 capable because they were intending on having that as a future product for their customers. And so, they were really nice to integrate all of our sensing compute onto and to turn into self-driving vehicles.”
(L3, or Level 3 automation means the vehicle can drive itself in most situations, but still requires human supervision. Level 4 vehicles can driver fully autonomously in certain environments without human supervision. Lucid just introduced a hands-free driving system for highways.)
In many ways, the size of this deal — “a minimum” of 20,000 vehicles, but expected to be “much, much more,” Ferguson 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. Today, Waymo is operating less than 2,000 vehicles in a handful of markets as part of a commercial robotaxi service. Tesla has a few dozen robotaxis 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.
Ferguson said that’s all about to change. Nuro has been operating driverless vehicles for several years now, albeit at low speeds and while avoiding highways. But he says the time is right to move on to the next level, and with Uber and Lucid in its corner, he’s confident they’ll reach these milestones.
“It’s really just a function of, at what level is the autonomy at and how many markets can it sustain,” Ferguson said. “Within those markets, these are big, big numbers and opportunities. And the vehicles will follow.
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![Census Proposal Would Stop Counting Undocumented Immigrants—and Ignore Race and Sexual OrientationThe US Department of Commerce, which oversees the Census Bureau, is circulating a proposed rule that would cease the collection of demographic data on racial minorities and LGBTQ+ people and prevent undocumented immigrants from being counted in the 2030 census, according to documents viewed by WIRED.The decision could have far-reaching implications for federal funding, particularly in states where there are substantial numbers of racial and ethnic minorities, as well as on immigrant communities across the country.The proposed rule, which is being circulated across government agencies for review, says the census will eliminate questions about race and sexual orientation “to protect from any distortions created from the inclusion of personal questions.” The memo also states that “illegal aliens (among others) should not be included in the apportionment count, they are not true inhabitants, members of the body politics [sic], or persons with ‘usual residence’ in the United States.”This would likely require the reintroduction of a census question about a respondent’s citizenship. During Donald Trump’s first presidential term, Republicans attempted to add a citizenship question to the census for the first time since 1950. The effort was struck down by the Supreme Court, 5-4, with Chief Justice John Roberts siding with the Court’s then-larger liberal bloc on the grounds that the justification for adding the question was “contrived.” The decision did not, though, find that citizenship questions are inherently unconstitutional.The Department of Commerce did not reply to requests for comment.“This is about the Voting Rights Act,” says Danah Boyd, a professor at Cornell University who studies the census, referencing the landmark voter protection legislation that the Supreme Court dismantled earlier this year. Eliminating the collection of these data, she says, would make it difficult to make basic assessments, like whether a congressional district is predominantly made of minorities.“If we don’t know certain things, we can’t challenge them politically,” says Boyd. “If we don’t know that certain peoples live in a particular geography, we can’t say, ‘Oh my gosh, here’s some massive inequality.’”Republicans and the Trump administration have long taken aim at the census. More recently, members of the Trump administration have attacked a little-known statistical method called “differential privacy,” which is used to prevent census data from being used to reidentify individual respondents, claiming that it makes the results inaccurate. In August 2025, Republican representative August Pfluger made another attempt to reintroduce a citizenship question on the census, sponsoring a bill called the COUNT Act, and in October, Republican senator Jim Banks of Indiana published a letter to Commerce secretary Howard Lutnick, writing, “There is a credible argument that the framers of the Constitution designed the Census to cover lawful inhabitants and not those who are present illegally.”Census questions are set between two and three years in advance of the actual survey, based on priorities set by the administration. The data from the census inform everything from the apportionment of congressional seats to federal funding that is allocated based on the size of a population.An employee at the Department of Health and Human Services, who asked to remain anonymous because they are not authorized to speak to the press, tells WIRED that “many HHS programs use Census data to appropriate funding. Removing undocumented individuals from the census will cause localities with high numbers of those populations to lose critical federal funding.”The employee says that removal of racial categories could specifically impact Native populations, which sometimes receive specialized funding. “Some programs use the ‘American Indian or Alaska Native’ category from the Census to make determinations of grants set aside for Tribal entities,” they say.#Census #Proposal #Stop #Counting #Undocumented #Immigrantsand #Ignore #Race #Sexual #Orientationus census,immigration,undocumented immigrants,race,lgbtq+](https://i0.wp.com/media.wired.com/photos/6a7630b55d2ebc1c5247b509/191:100/w_1280,c_limit/GettyImages-157580450-edited.jpg?ssl=1 "Census Proposal Would Stop Counting Undocumented Immigrants—and Ignore Race and Sexual OrientationThe US Department of Commerce, which oversees the Census Bureau, is circulating a proposed rule that would cease the collection of demographic data on racial minorities and LGBTQ+ people and prevent undocumented immigrants from being counted in the 2030 census, according to documents viewed by WIRED.The decision could have far-reaching implications for federal funding, particularly in states where there are substantial numbers of racial and ethnic minorities, as well as on immigrant communities across the country.The proposed rule, which is being circulated across government agencies for review, says the census will eliminate questions about race and sexual orientation “to protect from any distortions created from the inclusion of personal questions.” The memo also states that “illegal aliens (among others) should not be included in the apportionment count, they are not true inhabitants, members of the body politics [sic], or persons with ‘usual residence’ in the United States.”This would likely require the reintroduction of a census question about a respondent’s citizenship. During Donald Trump’s first presidential term, Republicans attempted to add a citizenship question to the census for the first time since 1950. The effort was struck down by the Supreme Court, 5-4, with Chief Justice John Roberts siding with the Court’s then-larger liberal bloc on the grounds that the justification for adding the question was “contrived.” The decision did not, though, find that citizenship questions are inherently unconstitutional.The Department of Commerce did not reply to requests for comment.“This is about the Voting Rights Act,” says Danah Boyd, a professor at Cornell University who studies the census, referencing the landmark voter protection legislation that the Supreme Court dismantled earlier this year. Eliminating the collection of these data, she says, would make it difficult to make basic assessments, like whether a congressional district is predominantly made of minorities.“If we don’t know certain things, we can’t challenge them politically,” says Boyd. “If we don’t know that certain peoples live in a particular geography, we can’t say, ‘Oh my gosh, here’s some massive inequality.’”Republicans and the Trump administration have long taken aim at the census. More recently, members of the Trump administration have attacked a little-known statistical method called “differential privacy,” which is used to prevent census data from being used to reidentify individual respondents, claiming that it makes the results inaccurate. In August 2025, Republican representative August Pfluger made another attempt to reintroduce a citizenship question on the census, sponsoring a bill called the COUNT Act, and in October, Republican senator Jim Banks of Indiana published a letter to Commerce secretary Howard Lutnick, writing, “There is a credible argument that the framers of the Constitution designed the Census to cover lawful inhabitants and not those who are present illegally.”Census questions are set between two and three years in advance of the actual survey, based on priorities set by the administration. The data from the census inform everything from the apportionment of congressional seats to federal funding that is allocated based on the size of a population.An employee at the Department of Health and Human Services, who asked to remain anonymous because they are not authorized to speak to the press, tells WIRED that “many HHS programs use Census data to appropriate funding. Removing undocumented individuals from the census will cause localities with high numbers of those populations to lose critical federal funding.”The employee says that removal of racial categories could specifically impact Native populations, which sometimes receive specialized funding. “Some programs use the ‘American Indian or Alaska Native’ category from the Census to make determinations of grants set aside for Tribal entities,” they say.#Census #Proposal #Stop #Counting #Undocumented #Immigrantsand #Ignore #Race #Sexual #Orientationus census,immigration,undocumented immigrants,race,lgbtq+")
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