Uber and Nuro begin testing premium robotaxi service in San Francisco

If you spot a Lucid Gravity SUV, equipped with sensors and a self-driving system developed by Nuro, driving around San Francisco, there’s a good chance it’s carrying an Uber employee.

Select Uber employees can now request a ride in a Lucid robotaxi through the Uber app. This is the latest phase of testing ahead of a planned public launch later this year. Nuro, which provided an update in a blog published Monday, told TechCrunch that the vehicle is operating in autonomous mode, with a human safety operator behind the wheel as a backup.

While this is far from a public launch, it represents progress for the company since announcing partnerships and multi-million dollar investments in July 2025. Uber invested $300 million in Lucid and separately agreed to buy ‘at least’ 20,000 units of the EV maker’s new Gravity SUV over the next six years.

The EV is equipped with Nuro’s autonomous vehicle system powered by Nvidia’s Drive AGX Thor computer. The Lucid Gravity Robotaxi, unveiled last January, is equipped with a high-resolution camera, solid-state lidar sensor, and radar that help the autonomous driving system recognize and operate the real environment.

Uber also invested an undisclosed amount of “hundreds of millions of dollars” in Nuro.

Uber plans to own and operate a premium robotaxi service with the help of a third party. Production of these modified Lucid Gravity vehicles is expected to begin in late 2026, according to regulatory filings published last year.

Nuro completed closed-course testing and began the first public road tests of its autonomous Lucid Gravity SUV late last year. Nuro currently has 100 Lucid Gravity SUVs equipped with self-driving systems in its engineering fleet, which are used to collect real-world data and test autonomous driving in several U.S. cities and states.

According to Nuro, employee test rides help the team evaluate how the autonomy stack, vehicle and rider experience will work and operate together in a real operational environment. It also allows teams to test how well the vehicles handle picking up and dropping off riders, a very demanding task in ride-hailing.