(Credit: Uber)
LAS VEGAS—Uber is at CES here to offer a higher-resolution view of the robotaxi it’s summoning from high-end EV manufacturer Lucid, unveiling what it calls the “production intent” design of an autonomous vehicle based on Lucid’s three-row Gravity SUV.
Details include a sensor array mounted on the roof and elsewhere, including cameras as well as radars and LiDAR sensors to provide a 360-degree view of the vehicle’s surroundings. Their data feeds into software from autonomous-mobility firm Nuro, running on hardware based on the Nvidia Drive AGX Hyperion self-driving-car platform.
The shelf-like roof stack will integrate an LED "halo display" to show the next rider’s initials at the pickup point. That personalization should be familiar to Waymo passengers, some of whom have been booking rides via Uber in Atlanta and Austin.
On the inside, Uber touts enough room to “comfortably” accommodate up to six passengers. Touch screens will let them adjust the temperature, seat heaters, and music; we hope it will be easier to play your own tunes than it is in a Waymo.
Those screens will also display visualizations of how the Nuro driver software sees other cars (that machine-vision perspective should be familiar to Tesla drivers) as well as its upcoming turns, stops, and other movements.
A two-row version of the Gravity on display here did not have touch screens I could interact with but did seem to feature a complete set of robotaxi hardware–including eight LiDAR sensors, half long-range and half short-range, placed around all four sides of the vehicle, plus 16 cameras.
Its roof stack featured three small screens, one on each side and another on the front, that showed notices like “Hello” and “See you later” but could also display messages for other road users. Those screens would not be easy to read until the car is right in front of you, but Uber’s app will let a rider choose a color and pattern for the LED highlight running around the front of the roof-mounted array.
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Uber calls this a “premium” service. That adjective suggests Uber Black pricing, not UberX or Uber Electric, even if Sarfraz Maredia, Uber's global head of autonomous mobility and delivery, is calling this “a unique new option for affordable and scalable autonomous rides.”
Whatever the pricing, turning an already-expensive Gravity electric car (prices start at $79,900 and run well into six figures) into a robotaxi bristling with add-on sensors will make it considerably more expensive. In a panel at Web Summit in Lisbon in November on that subject, Uber President and COO Andrew Macdonald said, "the economics don't work—today."
Uber and Nuro began autonomous tests on roads in December around the San Francisco Bay Area, where Uber aims to start Lucid robotaxi service “later this year” before expanding it nationwide with a planned fleet of 20,000-plus Lucid autonomous vehicles. Lucid, meanwhile, plans to start manufacturing these AVs at its Casa Grande, Arizona, plant later this year.
Macdonald said later in that panel that Uber wants to see the hardware costs of an autonomous vehicle “go somewhere from a half to a quarter of where it is today.”
To get there, Uber has placed a variety of bets with companies beyond Waymo and Lucid. The company—which scrapped an in-house project to develop self-driving vehicles after a test car hit and killed a pedestrian in Arizona in 2018—has inked partnerships with firms as big as Volkswagen and Nvidia and as small as the startup Avrides.
And in December, Uber announced that it would test robotaxis in London based on the Chinese tech giant Baidu's Apollo Go EV in the second half of 2026.
That option may not show up on American streets anytime soon, but globally Uber seems to be banking that the record of Chinese firms making high-quality EVs affordable means they can do the same for robotaxis. As Macdonald said at Web Summit: “The Chinese automotive sector has a proven track record of being able to iterate and have great tech but also bring the costs of that tech way down with scale.”