In partnership with an electric car company and an autonomous tech company, Uber is getting back into the robotaxi business, ten years after its first rushed attempt to put autonomous vehicles on the road.
Remember when former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick decided to disrupt things with some wholly unpermitted, untested autonomous vehicles that started appearing in San Francisco in December 2016? That early attempt to get ahead in the robotaxi wars turned into a high-profile battle with the California DMV, which got those auonomous vehicles yanked off the streets a week later.
Uber went on to continue testing its self-driving Volvos in Tempe, Arizona, leading to a collision in which one flipped over in March 2017. And then a year later, an Uber robotaxi in Tempe would strike and kill a woman who was walking her bicycle across the road, leading to a lengthy legal mess involving the operator who was behind the wheel at the time watching a show on her phone.
There was also the sticky issue that the head of Uber’s self-driving car division, Anthony Levandowski, had actually been poached from Google/Waymo, and Google promptly sued for theft of trade secrets. That suit was settled in 2018, but Levandowski was convicted for his crimes — and got a pardon from Trump in 2021.
This all led to Uber exiting the self-driving car business, and to Waymo then becoming the early, dominant player in the robotaxi game.
Well now Uber wants back in the game. As TechCrunch reports, the company is announcing the launch of a new, premium robotaxi service at TechCrunch Disrupt today in San Francisco, which will be in partnership with EV company Lucid Motors, and self-driving tech startup Nuro. The service is set to launch in late 2026.
“The Bay Area has long been the birthplace of transformative technology, and it’s only fitting that Uber’s next-generation robotaxi program with Lucid and Nuro will begin here — launching to the public next year,” says Uber chief product officer Sachin Kansal in a statement. “By combining deep expertise in electric vehicles, autonomy, and ridehailing, we’re laying the groundwork for safe and scalable autonomous rides in the Bay Area and beyond.”
Kansal is scheduled to be interviewed on the TechCrunch Disrupt stage Wednesday afternoon, alongside Nuro president and co-CEO Dave Ferguson.
When will we start seeing these Uber/Lucid robotaxi SUVs on the streets of SF? As the Chronicle reports, the company says it is getting ready to start testing “a sampling of 100 cars over the next few months,” though it’s unclear if all 100 will be in San Francisco, or spread across different locales. The company has plans for a fleet of 20,000 autonomous vehicles in six cities.
This may not sit well with Uber’s human drivers, who already are competing for fares with Waymo’s robots. But we all knew this was coming, right?
Soon, there will be competition from Zoox as well — Zoox is still in the testing phase here. The Amazon-owned autonomous vehicle company soon plans to give the public access to its four-seater buggies where passengers can face each other, and there is no driver’s seat.
Also, Tesla has been low-key running a robotaxi service around the Bay as well, though with drivers in the driver’s seats, because Tesla doesn’t have a permit yet to run a robotaxi service.
We may not be far from the day when robocars outnumber human-driven ones, at least in San Francisco — though they will need to learn how to get out of their own way and not gum up traffic on the regular, or else that will be a truly dystopian nightmare.
Previously: Uber Finally Convinced By DMV To Yank Self-Driving Cars Off SF Streets