I remember the first time I heard about Nuro. It's this company that's designed these interesting little robots, big robots, sort of. They're much bigger than the sidewalk robots you see around here, delivering groceries. Um, but you don't do that anymore.
We don't. We don't. So, we just celebrated our 10-year anniversary in August, which is shocking. Um, but as you mentioned, for the first several years of the company, we were focused on building a fully vertically integrated delivery-as-a-service product, and so we had these, I would say, cute vehicles that were about half the size of a car, fully electric, fully on roads. So that was also a difference relative to...
Yeah, like along the shoulder of the road, basically.
Well, in the middle of the road, really. I mean, they would go 35 miles per hour. So, you know, pretty significant speed.
So what was wrong about that model? What was wrong with that?
Actually, we love that model and we still love that business opportunity, but a couple things happened. So, one of them was in 2020, we recognized that for us to pursue that model, that go-to-market, we needed to raise quite a lot of capital. Because similar to sort of Waymo today, we were manufacturing our own vehicles. We were owning them. We were operating them. We were providing an entire service. In 2021, raising billions of dollars to support that vision was very doable. In 2022, things changed a little bit. Um, and so we sort of faced this juncture where the amount of capital that we needed to raise, we felt placed a pretty significant risk on the company given that markets were in a tough spot.
At the same time, our thesis had been from the start of the company that we were always focused on full autonomy. So vehicles that could drive themselves. I know your previous conversation with Kathy, you were talking about some of the driver-assistant products. For us, it was always full autonomy. And we believed that if we focused only on goods transportation rather than transporting people, we could solve that problem a bit more easily than the full passenger transportation problem. And the reason for that is that in self-driving, you're always balancing two pretty significant challenges. One of them is you need the system to be incredibly safe. And from a technical perspective, that pushes you towards defensive driving and being a really conservative driver on roads. But at the same time, if you're driving passengers, you want it to also be a comfortable experience. So you want it to be fairly confident, albeit aggressive maybe in some cases. And those two needs or pulls are really diametrically opposed because one of them is pushing you towards being conservative, the other one is pushing you towards being more aggressive. So, to cut it short, we believed that if we only focused on goods, we could really build an incredibly defensive driver and make it the safest autonomy system out on roads and put all of our effort behind that.
What ended up happening is all of our training data had been from expert humans driving on roads. And so because our entire autonomy approach was all AI, we ended up learning how to drive just like the expert data that we've been given, which was a human that was also driving comfortably, not just defensively. And so in 2022, we looked up and we said it's going to be a lot of capital for us to continue building this business. And the technology that we've built is actually very general purpose and we could apply it to passenger transportation as well as goods. And so we decided to pivot, and instead, for the last four or so years, I'd say we've been focused on just building the best possible general driver and then getting it behind as many wheels as possible of as many different vehicles.
Well, that's a good segue because you have a very interesting thing happening right now, which is a three-way partnership with Uber and Lucid, the EV luxury company, and yourselves to deploy a robo taxi. I think we have a photograph of the robo taxi. There it is. So, that's a little... good-looking car, right? Well, it has this funny thing on top of it.
That's the only bit that we did. Um, it's a very nice top hat. Top hats are in. Um, this is the Gravity, very...
Gravity SUV.
This is going to be nicer than any taxi ride that you've had.
Your words, not mine, but I love that. Yes. Now, we've tried very hard to make this an incredible product experience. So, this is based off of Lucid's Gravity SUV, which is a beautiful vehicle. We've added the quote-unquote funny stuff on the top that Joanne just mentioned, which is basically all of the sensing and compute that the vehicle needs to be able to drive itself. Um, but otherwise it was a fairly minimal integration. Lucid had already built this vehicle with all of the underlying hardware capabilities like the redundancy in steering and braking and so on that is needed to support for...
So that's why they're your partner. I take...
That was one of the big reasons. Yeah. And it's been an incredible partnership. We've moved very, very quickly on this. It's probably been about a year since we've been actively working on this vehicle and we still plan to launch this driverlessly this year.
This year. Okay. So it's already almost... it is October 1st.
Okay. So when, where, how many, and the important question: will there be a safety driver?
So this is going to be San Francisco Bay Area where our headquarters is, and Lucid's and Uber's as well. So it sort of makes a lot of sense there. Um, we've been operating with like 75 to 100 of these vehicles in our R&D test fleet. Uh, we're going to be transitioning to fully driverless by the end of this year. That's what we mean by launch. Um, so there won't be a safety driver. As a company, Nuro has been doing driverless operation on public roads for six years now, and, you know, that was with our custom vehicles, but nonetheless, we have a lot of experience in what it takes to safely validate a system, which honestly is months and months of work. We have roughly 40 different areas of extensive validation that we go through and really kick the tires, literally and figuratively, of the vehicle before we put it onto public roads. So that's something that we have done a lot in the past. This is the first time that we're doing it with a passenger vehicle that will take passengers. So it's a little bit different. The safety side is pretty similar, but some of those comfort elements are a little bit more onerous.
Okay. And you will call this on your Uber app, as you would any other Uber. Okay. So, but here's what I find interesting. So, your strategy depends on three companies working together doing three different things. Nuro, as you said, supplies the driver. Uber supplies the customers, the passengers, and they operate the network. Lucid supplies the cars. Lucid lately has been going through some rough times. They've restructured financially. They've let some people go. They've delayed some product. I'm wondering if Lucid can't deliver at the scale and pace that you are counting on, could you move the Nuro driver to another vehicle?
So maybe on the first element, Lucid has been a great partner and, you know, it's hard to build an EV company. There are very, very few, very few...
Very few that have made it.
Um, and, you know, I think they have already built a couple pretty tremendous products. The Gravity is an incredible product. It's a very, you know, it's won all sorts of awards. Um, we are collaborating with them on both this vehicle, which already exists today and is in production, and their next-generation vehicle, which is going to be a smaller, really cost-efficient, cost-competitive product that I think collectively we're even more excited about as the future of mobility generally. Uh, they have a new CEO, Marc Winterhoff, who's great. Uh, we have a really strong relationship. We feel very good about Lucid and I think that, yeah, they've had a bunch of rumors that I think they have refuted pretty strongly. Um, when Nuro and Uber got together and decided to do this program, we spent a lot of time with a lot of OEMs. You can imagine we talked to basically everyone. Um, and we decided collectively to choose Lucid because we did see them as the best possible partner for us to work with. There were upsides and downsides there. Um, but we remain really confident that they are the right partner and that we're on track to deliver together. This robo taxi program is probably their top priority. I think this and their next-gen vehicle are their top priorities as a company, and we feel that every day. We have engineers of Lucid on site at Nuro every day helping us get through this final stage. So we feel good about that.
Um, the second part of your question, the Nuro driver, as I mentioned, is a general driver. We are focused on three different verticals, let alone partners. So we're doing robo taxi, we're doing logistics, and so we're looking to partner, and that is sort of closer to our roots in terms of goods delivery. Uh, and then we're also working longer term on personally owned vehicles that will be fully autonomous. So yes, we're going to be applying this to multiple verticals, and you'll hear more soon on that, and multiple OEMs within each vertical.
