The Lucid Gravity SUV runs Nuro’s autonomous driving system, powered by Nvidia Drive AGX Thor. A human safety operator sits behind the wheel. Uber has committed to buying at least 20,000 of these vehicles over the next six years.
Uber and Nuro have begun employee test rides of a premium robotaxi service in San Francisco, using the Lucid Gravity SUV equipped with Nuro’s autonomous driving system.
Select Uber employees can now request a ride through the Uber app; the vehicles are operating in autonomous mode with a human safety operator present as backup.
The move marks the latest phase of a partnership announced in July 2025, when Uber made a $300 million investment in Lucid and separately invested an undisclosed ‘multi-hundred-million dollar’ amount into Nuro.
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The Lucid Gravity robotaxi was revealed publicly in January 2026. It is fitted with high-resolution cameras, solid-state lidar sensors, and radar arrays that feed Nuro’s autonomy stack, which is powered by Nvidia’s Drive AGX Thor compute platform.
Nuro currently has 100 Lucid Gravity SUVs in its engineering fleet, used for real-world data collection and autonomous driving tests across multiple US cities and states. Production of the modified vehicles for commercial service is expected to begin in late 2026, according to a regulatory filing.
The employee testing phase is designed to evaluate how the autonomy stack, the vehicle, and the rider experience function together in a live operating environment, and specifically to test pickup and drop-off operations, which are among the most technically demanding aspects of autonomous ride-hailing.
Uber has committed to buying at least 20,000 of the Gravity SUVs over the next six years, and plans to own and operate the premium robotaxi service, likely with the assistance of a third-party operator.
The Uber-Nuro pairing is one of several robotaxi partnerships Uber has assembled as it pursues a platform strategy that keeps it in the ride-hailing market without bearing the full cost of developing autonomous vehicle technology in-house.
Uber’s investment in Verne, the Zagreb-based robotaxi service that launched Europe’s first commercial autonomous ride service in April 2026, follows the same logic. A public launch of the San Francisco Lucid/Nuro service is planned for later in 2026.
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