Uber and Nuro begin testing premium robotaxi service in San Francisco

If you spot a Lucid Gravity SUV blinged-out with sensors — and a self-driving system developed by Nuro — driving around San Francisco, chances are that’s an Uber employee taking a ride.

Select Uber employees can now request a ride in a Lucid robotaxi through the Uber app, the latest phase of testing ahead of a planned public launch later this year. Nuro, which provided the update in a blog posted Monday, told TechCrunch the vehicles are operating in autonomous mode and have a human safety operator behind the wheel as backup.

While this is far from a public launch, it does signal the companies’ progress since announcing a partnership and multimillion-dollar investment in July 2025. Uber invested $300 million in Lucid and separately agreed to buy “at least” 20,000 of the EV maker’s new Gravity SUV over the next six years.

Those EVs are equipped with Nuro’s autonomous vehicle system, which is powered by Nvidia’s Drive AGX Thor computer. The Lucid Gravity robotaxi, which was revealed in January, is outfitted with high-resolution cameras, solid-state lidar sensors, and radars that help the self-driving system perceive the real-world environment and operate in it.

Uber also invested an undisclosed “multi-hundred-million dollar” amount into Nuro.

The plan is for Uber to own and operate — likely with the help from a third party — the premium robotaxi service. Production of these modified Lucid Gravity vehicles is expected to begin in late 2026, according to a regulatory filing posted last year.

Nuro completed closed-course testing and started its first public road testing of the autonomous Lucid Gravity SUVs late last year. Nuro now has 100 Lucid Gravity SUVs outfitted with its self-driving system in the engineering fleet, used to gather real-world data and test autonomous driving across multiple U.S. cities and states.

According to Nuro, the employee test rides help the team evaluate how the autonomy stack, vehicle, and rider experience work together and function in a live operating environment. It also allows the team to test how well the vehicle handles rider pickups and drop-offs, a notoriously tricky operation in autonomous ride-hailing.