Waymo is the undisputed leader in the robotaxi space, operating a fleet of over 3,000 driverless cars in at least 10 cities across the US. A number of companies, including Tesla, Zoox, Avride, and Motional, are racing to catch up with the Alphabet-owned firm. But what if being No. 2 was actually better?
Nuro, the delivery robot company created by veterans of Google’s self-driving car project, thinks it has a decent shot at occupying the slot. After pivoting from delivery to robotaxis in 2024, Nuro struck a deal with Uber and Lucid to deploy tens of thousands of robotaxis all across the US — netting itself hundreds of millions of dollars in investment from Uber in the process. Nuro plans on launching the service in San Francisco later this year. And earlier this month, it was granted the first of several permits it will need in order to launch that service.
It’s almost better for Nuro that Waymo is scaling at the pace that it is, said Dave Ferguson, cofounder and co-CEO of Nuro. Its early successes, as well as its stumbles and missteps, then become fodder for Nuro’s engineers to reassess and reevaluate, with the goal of answering the question: Could we have done better?
What if being No. 2 was actually better?
“There is a lot of value in this sort of classic second mover perspective,” Ferguson said in a recent interview. “We have a huge amount of respect for Waymo … In some of the rare cases where they’re having challenges, [Nuro is] using those to kick the tires on our system and make sure that it would behave in a way that we’re comfortable and proud of as well.”
The fact that Ferguson has respect for Waymo isn’t a surprise. He got his start at Google’s self-driving car project that would go on to become Waymo, along with Nuro cofounder and co-CEO Jiajun Zhu. The two left Google in 2016 to found Nuro, first as a robot delivery service, and now as an aspiring robotaxi operator. Nuro also aims to license its autonomous driving technology to outside companies, including car companies that want to use it for advanced driver-assist systems and personally owned autonomous vehicles — though it has yet to announce any deals.
To be sure, Nuro is late to the robotaxi party. While Nuro was handling groceries, Waymo was handling passengers. But Ferguson argues that Nuro’s technology is easily transferable to robotaxis — even if its passenger experience is still zero.
That’s where his “second mover” theory comes into play. Unlike Waymo, which had to discover many operational challenges firsthand, Nuro believes it will benefit from watching the Alphabet-owned company operate a large-scale robotaxi service before fully launching its own.
To that end, Ferguson wants Nuro’s robotaxi service to be broadly useful when it first launches. He suggested that some features, like freeway driving, may arrive later, but that the launch will not follow an ultra-incremental playbook where the company initially handles only certain scenarios before slowly adding more complex ones over time. That said, Nuro doesn’t plan to include “the entire South Bay on day one,” Ferguson said.
“The plan is very much on day one for this to be a very useful service,” he said. “This is not going to be only protected intersections, and then slowly we add unprotected … It’s going to be a very broad [operational design domain] to begin with.”
The Uber-Lucid-Nuro robotaxi service is unique, insofar as it involves three distinct companies: a rideshare network, an automaker, and an autonomous vehicle startup. Under the arrangement, Nuro develops the sensing and compute stack and works closely with Lucid to integrate that technology into the vehicle, the Lucid Gravity SUV. The integration happens directly on Lucid’s production line, meaning the vehicles leave the factory already equipped with Level 4 autonomy. Those completed vehicles are then sold to Uber, which becomes the owner and operator of the fleet. The rideshare company will manage the depots and operational infrastructure associated with running the service.
Uber will also manage remote assistance for the vehicles, Ferguson said. Remote assistance has come under fire lately, with some members of Congress demanding Waymo and others be more forthcoming about their use of offsite workers to oversee the vehicles. Ferguson said this has led to the spread of misinformation about companies using remote workers to actively control the robotaxis. What they really do, he said, is answer questions and provide prompts to help the vehicles when they get confused.
“The view that the public probably jumps to when they’re told remote assistance of self-driving vehicles is someone in a dark room driving a car around like they’re playing a video game,” he said. “I think that is pretty far from how remote assistance typically works.”
Nuro’s long-term goal is to build the most capable AI driving system possible, with the intention of putting it to work in a variety of ways, including delivery, he said. To that end, Nuro’s longevity in the field ensures that the company can apply the lessons from its older, more rules-based machine learning systems, as well as its current end-to-end learning models that produce a more naturalistic driving style. According to Ferguson, that legacy is critical even as the industry transitions toward more AI-heavy approaches.
“You can think of this as sanity checking to make sure that what we’re doing doesn’t get too close to pedestrians, doesn’t get too close to other vehicles, isn’t violating any traffic rules,” he said.
He acknowledged that robotaxis are suffering from a lack of public trust, especially around edge cases and other incidents in which autonomous vehicles block traffic. Nuro intends to follow Waymo’s model of being transparent with some of its driving statistics in the interest of building trust with its customers, Ferguson said.
“The more evidence we have of Nuro and Uber and Lucid providing a product that is dramatically safer and better for our streets than a human-driven vehicle … the better that is for everyone,” he said. The company is still trying to “strike the right balance of how much detail do we provide, such that it’s actually understandable and relatable to the general public.” But Ferguson said he’s confident they’ll get there.
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
