Transcript: Nuro, Uber & Lucid Strike Gold: Inside the Global Three-Way Deal Transforming Autonomy

Executive Summary

In a landmark move for the autonomous vehicle industry, Nuro has partnered with Uber and Lucid to bring a commercial robotaxi service to the global market. Andrew Chapin, a key figure at Nuro, joins the podcast to unpack the details of this groundbreaking partnership. He discusses the validation of Nuro’s licensing model, the AI-first technology powering the Nuro Driver, and the strategic plan to deploy tens of thousands of vehicles,

Key Topics & Timestamps

[00:25] The Genesis of the Deal 

Andrew Chapin explains how the partnership grew organically from Nuro’s existing relationship with Uber on the delivery side, leading to Uber making a significant bet on Nuro for its autonomous vehicle future. 

[02:40] A Win-Win-Win Structure

The discussion covers the deal’s structure, where each company focuses on its core competency: Nuro provides the autonomy stack, Lucid builds the vehicle, and Uber brings its global marketplace. Nuro’s licensing fee will come directly from Uber. 

[04:10] Nuro’s AI-First Technology

The core AI-first architecture of the Nuro Driver remains, but its capabilities will expand significantly with data collection from over 150 cities worldwide, leading to a commercial launch with a high safety bar late next year. 

[05:20] Global Ambitions and a 20,000 Vehicle Floor

Andrew Chapin confirms the deal is “explicitly global in nature,” with a roadmap for international expansion. The initial commitment of 20,000 vehicles is seen as a starting point for a much larger global deployment. 

[08:30] The Role of the Lucid Gravity

The Lucid Gravity was chosen for its long range, fast charging, and superior user experience, which create favorable unit economics for a robotaxi service. Range and efficiency are critical for maximizing asset utilization. 

[14:15] The Path to Level 4 and Over-the-Air Updates

The Lucid Gravity’s hardware redundancies allow it to be Level 4 capable quickly. Nuro will be able to push software updates to the Nuro Driver over-the-air, thanks to Lucid’s existing vehicle infrastructure. 

[23:15] The Business Discipline Behind the Pivot

Andrew Chapin discusses Nuro’s “substance over style” culture and the principled, though difficult, decision to pivot from its delivery bots to a more capital-efficient licensing model. 

[27:10] The Roadmap to a Mapless Future

While the initial launch cities will rely on HD maps, Nuro is actively moving toward a mapless approach, which is a critical component for unlocking personally-owned autonomous vehicles in the future. 

Watch the Full Episode of The Road to Autonomy

Full Episode Transcript

Grayson Brulte: Andrew Chapin, it’s great to have you back on the road to autonomy. I gotta tell you, sir, Nuro’s pivot to licensing is paying off in a big way. The deal with Uber and Lucid, I saw the headlines that, holy shit, wow, they did it. How did that deal come about? ’cause I read your SEC filings on it from, from the lucid side and the Uber side, and there was a lot of really impressive details in there.

Andrew Chapin: Yeah, it’s great to be back racing. Good to see you again. I know we. Teased this a little bit last time, but super excited to be here and share some deals, uh, share some news on the deal rather. Uh, obviously as you say, this is hugely validating for Nuro. We’re incredibly excited about it. I think it’s validating both for the licensing shift as you mentioned.

It’s also just validating for where we are as a company, the maturity of our technology and how close we are to actually commercializing that at scale. In terms of how the deal came about, it was really quite organic. We’ve had a relationship with Uber for a number of years now. In fact, in 2022, we announced a partnership on the delivery side.

And so as that partnership evolved, we’ve been doing real deliveries with our Prius fleet, uh, with Uber Eats. And it became clear that Uber was looking to make a big bet and really secure its AV future. And as that became clearer. And we started talking about what that might look like. They went through a process which, uh, obviously I can’t speak to, that’s their business, but the end result was that Nuro was the AV player they wanted to make that bet on.

And so as we started thinking about what the vehicle platform was. We actually wanted to go to Market with Lucid, came into the picture and as we thought about the strength of that platform, the hardware redundancy that would allow it to be level four autonomous in driving the user experience the range, which would allow really favorable unit economics.

It really just came together in a beautiful way and we’re super excited about bringing it to market. It’s been a fascinating project to work on. The prototype vehicles have been. Something we’ve been working on since early this year. Uh, so I’ve already driven in one, uh, in fully autonomous mode on our closed course track in Vegas, and super excited to be here to talk about it.

Grayson Brulte: If you look at it from the lucid side, Eric Bach, their chief engineer, is an incredible engineer. The way that he’s built the, the vehicles, and then if you look at it from the Uber side, it was very interesting about a month and a half ago, Andrew Chapin. McDonald’s, I’m sure he was involved with this deal. All of, suddenly he’s COO was like, oh, we got an AV guy in the Uber C-Suite there.

See, all the pieces are coming together. From a deal standpoint, is this purely a licensing deal where Nuro is licensing the driver to Lucid? Are you licensing it to Uber? How does, how does that work from a deal structure standpoint?

Andrew Chapin: The beauty of this deal is that each party gets to do what it is best at Nuro brings its autonomy stack, so both hardware and software. Uber obviously brings the marketplace, global demand, global reach, and Lucid brings a really fantastic vehicle in the Lucid Gravity. As we talked about, uh, a second ago in terms of the underlying economic model, Uber and its Fleet partners will be purchasing the vehicles from Lucid that’s been made public.

And in terms of the Nuro licensing model, yes, you are correct. We are receiving a licensing fee in this case. It will be from Uber.

Grayson Brulte: Wow. So the, the you’re, you’re truly, truly validating the model and you’re not gonna own the asset, which is great from a technical standpoint. Last September, you were very kind, you hosted me at the Nuro headquarters. We went, arrived for around Mountain View, and I told you I was very impressed. How has the technology changed or how has the stack changed from the vehicle that we were in together?

The Prius to what’s gonna be coming available on the gravity.

Andrew Chapin: The core autonomy architecture really has not changed much. We rely on an end-to-end. Model with kind of traditional robotics based safeguards in order to validate performance, make sure that it is safe, ensure a really high floor in terms of the performance of the overall system. So that has not changed.

We are an AI first company. Our AV stack is AI first. What will change and what will evolve is the generalizability of the model because of how much incremental data that we are collecting. Um, we’ve now collected data in 150 cities. Across the world. That’s numbers only going to go up. We’re doing more international data collect.

We’ve talked about that a little bit. And so the fundamental model is only going to get more capable. But again, in terms of foundation, uh, this is just building on what we’ve done already. We’ve got multiple years now, four plus years of driverless deployments that we’re building on. Uh, and all of that will come together in the form of.

A safety case with a very high bar that will allow us to launch a commercial robotaxis service late next year with Uber.

Grayson Brulte: You said two words that stuck out to me. Global and international. And if you look at who’s backed by Lucid is the Saudi PIF, the Public Investment Fund you’re testing globally. Lucid has global ambitions now with the new Riyadh plant coming online. And it was alluded to a little bit in the filing that this deal could potentially be global.

Obviously it’s, it was very clearly say you’re starting in a US market. But over time, do you see this deal eventually becoming global?

Andrew Chapin: Absolutely. The deal itself is explicitly global in nature. Uh, we have a roadmap of international cities that we’ve already roughly aligned on with the three parties. Uh, I’m not in a position to share that just yet, uh, but come, uh, a few years from now, you will see us. Launched this service internationally and we’re, we’re very excited about that.

I think one of the things that Uber really brings to the table, as I mentioned, is this global reach. And so you saw in the headline, uh, this commitment of a minimum of 20,000 vehicles over the next six years. We really see that as the floor, what we’re actually trying to achieve in terms of the scale of this deal is much, much larger than that.

Uh, we see a multiple of that being deployed across the world in that same time, horizon.

Grayson Brulte: I wanna highlight to the audience here, this is not a reservation press release. If you read the SEC filing contractually, minimum guarantee is 10,000. So you’re going to deploy a large amount of vehicles there. The 20,000, yeah, I believe it was just a starting off point. So how long until these vehicles end up in Saudi Arabia?

20 27, 28. The minister was out there last week touting the fact that he wants autonomy.

Andrew Chapin: We’re very excited to launch there, uh, in, in due time. We’ll, we’ll share more in the future in terms of when that can, that can happen concretely.

Grayson Brulte: Another thing that I noticed in the the SEC filing, it’s gonna be a common trend ’cause I went through ’em, is that Uber is paying lucid for tooling. That was very, very interesting. As it comes to the, the integration aspect for the the Nuro driver, do you send CAD drawings to Lucid? Do you actually send physical hardware?

How does that work from an engineering standpoint, since you and all of your public announcements and in the filing made it very clear? So these are gonna be factory grade vehicles.

Andrew Chapin: This deal and this commercial tie up more broadly really is different than anything else out there in a number of ways. So as you rightly noted, the Nuro driver hardware is being integrated into the lucid gravity vehicle on the production line. So when we think about the Nuro driver, it’s both the software and the hardware spec.

So the sense and compute, we spent a lot of time optimizing the cost of, we think the overall cost of our sense and compute is a huge part of what has made this attractive to Uber. It makes the unit economics work, uh, despite an overall. Uh, price point on the vehicle that you might think would be too expensive, but when you actually look at the lifetime of the vehicle, how it can be utilized because of the very high range, uh, and the overall unit economics of our hardware.

It’s a very compelling option and Uber would not have made this bet, uh, in the scale that it did if that were not the case. But I think the integration is a big part of it. Two, as you noted, is the commitment to scale. Uh, lucid and Nuro, both are the beneficiaries of the commitment that Uber has made in terms of the minimum scale and when you put the economics behind this, that Uber has in terms of the investment in both.

Nuro and lucid. It really just unlocks a lot of things. It unlocks a better product experience, but fundamentally, we are solving for scale, really solid unit economics, a really safe experience, and a really fantastic user experience as well.

Grayson Brulte: Okay. Three things to unpack. There you have the product, the user experience of the range. And if you look, I’ll call ’em the chattering class. ’cause they, they just chatter and they make up numbers. Oh, lucid gravity is too much. I said, no. If you look at the range and you look at the engineering, you look at the overall maintenance cost, it’s a, it’s very compelling.

And if you look at, let’s just, you, you estimate where your stack is gonna cost from a cost efficiency standpoint. You can really scale. So you have that. So let’s unpack that. Did range play a big role in this, in choosing, ’cause obviously they have the air and, and they have the gravity. I think you made the right choice person with the gravity.

It’s a bigger vehicle. And you passed the golf club test, so you can put golf clubs in the back of the, the, the Nuro lucid vehicle. Did, did range play a large part of.

Andrew Chapin: It was certainly an aspect of the gravity that made it attractive. When you think about making the economics of a Robotaxis service work at scale, it’s really. What does the asset cost, both the vehicle and the AV hardware, and how well can you utilize that asset and monetize it in a robotaxi use case?

And so when you think about the gravity having such a large range, that just allows for much greater uptime, it can also charge incredibly quickly. And so the overall picture of fleet management and asset utilization. Is very favorable. And again, Uber, they know what they’re doing. Uh, they’ve been working at this for quite some time.

Uh, and I think when you look at the bet that they’ve make made in terms of scale, they would not have done that if the overall unit economics were not something that they felt very confident in. And I think the fact that this can both go global in terms of volume of vehicles. Because of the integration at the production line, the scale that Uber has in its marketplace and the scalability of the internet economics really make this a, a incredibly consequential deal.

When you look at the overall robotaxi market, I really don’t think it’s hyperbolic to say that this is one of the most consequential commercial partnerships that has happened in our industry to date.

Grayson Brulte: I said it a few weeks ago in The Road to Autonomy newsletter that Uber struck gold with this deal. I truly believe that because what Nuro Lucid partnership gave Uber was the de-risk against the, the Waymo relationship. ’cause nobody knows where that’s going and, and you de-risk that. But what you also did, and I’ve said this years ago, going back to when Travis was still running Uber with X, was the inconsistency of the product of x.

X is a very inconsistent product. You have good rides, you have bad rides, and you have in between rides. But what you are giving them is a consistent, high level, high quality product with your partner. Lucid. Andrew Chapin McDonald has confirmed this to me very publicly on X, that they’re working on a robotaxi tier right now.

If you’re in Atlanta, or you’re Austin, you order Waymo. It’s on the Uber X Tier, but you can get it on comfort knowing that a robotaxi tier is coming and Uber’s publicly confirmed that. Do we get a, it’s called a special lucid tier because the Lucid Gravity is a, it’s a luxury vehicle, it’s a consistent product.

Do we eventually get their own tier?

Andrew Chapin: It’s an interesting question. I can’t speak to Uber’s strategy, but what I will say is the general challenge you articulate is one that, uh, Andrew Chapin McDonald and I know quite well, uh, we worked together back at Uber. In the early days. I started in 2011. He, he was shortly thereafter. And, uh, we were both in the operations functions.

And I think the consistency of supply was a challenge then. It’s a challenge now. And when you look at the gravity vehicle, I. How amazing of an experience it’s gonna be just from a vehicle standpoint. Uh, and then you layer on autonomy on top of it. It’s something that we’re just incredibly excited about.

So, uh, again, I, I’d have to defer to Uber in terms of how they think about positioning the product, how they think about pricing the product, so on. We’re just really focused on delivering autonomy that is incredibly safe, incredibly scalable. And the gravity itself delivers a really spacious, quiet, comfortable experience in a way that I don’t think exists today.

Grayson Brulte: And it’s extremely well engineered. I gotta give Lucid a lot of credit. They’re extremely well engineered vehicles. Obviously you’re providing the Nuro driver, you’re providing the specs for the hardware you’re providing the, uh. AI software that powers it. Is is your team, ’cause you have the operational experience, are you having any advice or insight that you’re offering Uber from a maintenance and, and ongoing fleet deployment strategy?

Is that, do you have offer any insight on that?

Andrew Chapin: The vehicle itself is something that Lucid is the most, uh, well-versed in. We are obviously working together. All three parties to create a service that has very, very high uptime and has the unit economics that I mentioned before. And so we will certainly be providing some help, uh, in terms of how Uber and its fleet partners manage the AV hardware itself to solve for that really, really high uptime.

Grayson Brulte: One thing I’ve noticed from your, your competitors, some of your competitors don’t have a very strong supply chain, knowing that you’re going towards a 26 launch and then eventually you’re going towards a global launch. Are you working today to secure the supply chain to ensure that. If you have the components you need for your hardware in case there is a maintenance issue, that if you want to just use the term hot swap, you can swap men.

Those vehicles can keep that really high uptime.

Andrew Chapin: Vehicle programs like this certainly have risks, and in the current day and age, supply chain is one of them just given geopolitical concerns, the trade dynamics, so on. So it’s certainly on the, the list of risks that we are keeping an eye on and trying to mitigate. Uh, I can’t get into much more detail than that, but certainly the ability to scale is contingent on having the hardware available.

So we’re we’re taking that very seriously.

Grayson Brulte: I’ll put that in plain terms. You’re on top of it. How’s that?

Andrew Chapin: Yes. Yes, I would agree.

Grayson Brulte: So obviously you’re, as I said, you’re providing the software. How are the updates gonna work? So the engineering team says, okay, we’re ready to push out Nuro driver 2.02, 2.1. Uh, how are those updates gonna work? Is that gonna be managed by Nuro from the software perspective?

Andrew Chapin: Well, I talked a little bit about the. Advanced engineering of the gravity vehicle. And that applies both to the fundamental hardware redundancies that allow this to be level four capable. So quickly. It also applies to things like over-the-air updates. Uh, and so when you, when you talk specifically, uh, about updating the Nuro driver, that is something that we’ll be able to do over the air, thanks to the existing infrastructure that Lucid has built.

Grayson Brulte: Did Lucid have to build? If you used the autonomous trucking term, a dual redundancy chassis, was there anything special that has to go into these gravities in order to accommodate the Nuro driver

Andrew Chapin: Lucid has made a lot of investment already in having the necessary hardware redundancy for these vehicles to be L four capable, and so. One of the things I think is really exciting is, again, just how quickly this came together. We got the first prototype vehicle earlier this year, and within seven weeks we had it driving autonomously on our closed course facility in Vegas.

Um, part of that was the hardware redundancy, but the full integration has just been so smooth. Uh, and it’s been really great to work with the lucid technical teams on that. The Prius vehicle that you. Rode in last year, Grayson Brulte, uh, we actually kind of had to hack into, in order to get the, the, the system to respond to our controls, we had to, we had to do some work there, uh, to get that, uh, fully functional from an autonomous standpoint, the integration with the lucid vehicles.

Really was deep from day one. Uh, and so the controls are super smooth. The integration has happened very quickly. The general cultural compatibility between our engineering teams has been really high. Uh, so there’s just a lot to be excited about in terms of the technical collaboration.

Grayson Brulte: Another thing I’ve noticed. In the photos that you’ve released as part of the deal that the sensor stack, I, i is very slim. Was that done by design? Because that goes back to what Walt and I have talked about blending into the communities. If I saw a gravity or, or I saw, let’s say the Nuro gravity. Oh, okay.

Just, it’s just a, nor it’s a normal car. Maybe it’s a ski rack. Was that design done on purpose to blend in to be a part of the community?

Andrew Chapin: One of the shifts we made in terms of our overall effort to make our hardware stack as cost efficient as possible is move to automotive grade components, and specifically on the lidar front. We use solid state lidar in instead of rotary lidar like we have in the past. And so you’ll see some of our vehicles on the road that have the very tall top hat with the, the, uh, rotary lidar on it.

That has shifted to a solid state lidar and it’s a just more compact, uh, piece of equipment. And so that has allowed us to create this structure that you see on the top of the vehicles that is quite slim. It’s very aerodynamic, so on. Lucid has invested a ton of time and engineering resources to make their vehicles aerodynamic.

That’s part of what allows for the 450 mile range. And so it’s been a very close collaboration with them to. Package the sensors and integrate them into a vehicle in a way that not only is very aerodynamic, to maintain that range, but also solves for aesthetics. Uh, we want this to look as much like a normal vehicle as possible.

And so we’ve put a lot of care into the design of that top hat you see in the pictures that we’ve shared and just how the rest of the sensors are integrated into the body. So overall, I think it’s a really interesting step in terms of. How the Nuro driver will evolve over the years into powering perhaps personally owned vehicles, uh, in a way that does not compromise aesthetics.

Grayson Brulte: Personally on is coming at, at some point. You and I have talked about that the, the, the last time you were on is the deal with Lucid. Would you say this is the first step of many potential OEM deals that you’re looking at?

Andrew Chapin: We have a lot of exciting things in the works. Uh, on the commercial side. Uh, there are some efforts on the personally owned vehicles, uh, as we’ve talked about a little bit. I’m not in a position to share more. Today, but those are actively being worked on. We have some active engagements on that front. We also have other verticals that we’re working on, uh, that are non robotaxi, non personally owned vehicles, other use cases.

So we really are trying to build this AI based driver that is applicable across a wide variety of use cases. This Uber lucid deal is a huge validation point in terms of how far that technology has come, what its commercial scalability is. Uh, we’ll hope to have more to share in terms of other use cases in the coming months.

Grayson Brulte: From a hardware perspective, when you do eventually go to personally owned, could we just assume that it’ll look very similar to the Gravity or, or is, is your engineering team building a completely different stack for personally owned?

Andrew Chapin: The core Nuro driver sense and compute configuration for a level four application is something that we feel very confident in. From a performance and cost perspective, there are. Other potential use cases of the Nuro driver that perhaps may not be full level four, and it may be adjusted to accommodate that in a way that, uh, isn’t quite as robust from a, a full sensor perspective.

Uh, but we’ll have more to share on that, uh, in, in due time.

Grayson Brulte: Okay. So based on that, I’ll say the economics of where you’re going. Look very good. And there’s a reason why Uber invested as part of this deal. We know that you’re gonna launch on the Uber platform together. We know that you’re gonna go global. What? What else is planned here?

Andrew Chapin: Well, this is a really, really big ambitious partnership here we are trying to deploy tens of thousands of vehicles around the world. Serve many, many millions of, uh, robotaxi customers. Uh, and ultimately this is a big robotaxi bet for us. And so we’re very focused on delivering the technology on time in a way that is safe.

Scalable, so on. Uh, I don’t want to downplay that. That’s a, that’s a, a big undertaking. We feel very confident in our ability to deliver it. Uber does as well. Uh, they know what they’re doing in this regard. They could have chosen anyone to make this bet on and they did their homework and chose Nuro. So we’re really excited, first and foremost to deliver that.

Uh, but it really is just a jumping off point. I think the aspirations that Uber has, that Nuro has so on for this partnership are much larger than even some of the headline numbers would suggest.

Grayson Brulte: Oh, what it does is it, it validate, I know I said it before, but it validates your licensing pivot, which I said at the time, and I’ll say it again, I think was a, was a brilliant move by the team. So you’re going into robotaxi, you’re going into personally own, and let’s call it, let’s call it Nuro Other Bets.

You’ve got a Nuro other Bets program going on. What happens to the beloved, I call it the Pixar character. I’m sorry. What happens to the bots? Do the bots, do they, do you, do you send, you sell ’em to Disney and then they start appearing in Pixar movies? Or do we eventually see those deployed at some point?

Andrew Chapin: It’s not something we plan to scale commercially, but the bots have been really important for us to develop. The capabilities of doing driverless deployments, it obviously is not something that a human could even fit in. Uh, and so from day one, it is occupant list. It is driverless. We did a big announcement late last year in terms of the deployment that we did at C scale with those vehicles.

And when you zoom out and think about where a given AV player is in its journey, the the things that I would encourage people to assess would be one, what is their experience in doing driverless deployment? If you have L four aspirations, you need a track record of doing driverless deployments. You need to show that you can validate the safety of your system and actually deploy it in a fully driverless capacity.

And uh, again, I think the fact that Nuro has done that for four or five years now speaks volumes to where we are in our overall technical maturity. The other big one that people should look at is do you have a vehicle platform that can. Integrate the AV hardware on the production line is scalable and has favorable unit economics.

Clearly, we now have that with the lucid platform. And so the bot, again, is something that, uh, we’ve invested a lot in, we think has taught us a lot in terms of doing the fundamental integrations, scaling these vehicle programs. It’s just not something that we plan to scale into the future. Uh, this Lucid Gravity platform is really the focus right now.

There will be other platforms that that follow, uh, as I mentioned, but a delivery only form factor is probably not gonna be one of them.

Grayson Brulte: Could we eventually see a Lucid Air at some point, perhaps.

Andrew Chapin: I can’t share concrete plans, but uh, I think it’s reasonable to assume that the gravity is not the only vehicle that we will ultimately integrate the Nuro driver onto.

Grayson Brulte: Smart. I’ll leave it at that. I won’t push. I’ll say, I’ll say very smart by shutting down if you want to use that term or or pausing or the off ramp of the bot. The company is showing, in my opinion, a lot of business discipline. Where does that discipline come from? Is it, is it coming from the founders or where, where does that come from?

Because I gotta give you a lot of credit. Nobody knew you two, three years ago where you guys were gonna go and then you were very kind to host me and, and laid everything out for me. And I walked out at me and said, okay, they, they got something going on here now prove it. And boy, oh boy, you proved it.

Where does that business discipline stem from?

Andrew Chapin: Nuro’s culture generally is more about substance over style. We have been heads down quietly building one of the most advanced autonomy stacks in the world over the last couple years, and we’ve certainly navigated some uncertainty in terms of how that will ultimately get brought to market, but. I give our founders, JZ and Dave, a lot of credit in terms of being very principled in making decisions around how we are going to move this business forward.

And we were kind of staring into the abyss in terms of not having a clear go to market when we paused that R three delivery bot program. But at the end of the day, we had to look internally and say, we don’t think that’s the right decision. It is too capital intensive and we want to make this vet. That the ecosystem will evolve such that we can license our L four autonomy stack, focus on our core competency, uh, and have the rest of the value chain form around us.

And so I can’t claim at the time when we made that decision that uh, it was clear all those pieces would come together. But I think ultimately. You just have to be very principled in, uh, taking risks and dealing with the uncertainty and choosing the right answer even when it’s uncomfortable. And I think the need to be capital efficient has been really uncomfortable at times.

We talked about this when I was on last. Uh, we run very lean as the company. But again, it’s paying off the fact that we, uh, have made it this far. We now have this deal that really validates our future, our model, and we have plenty of runway. Sets us up really well for this next phase of autonomous vehicles generally.

Grayson Brulte: And you never gave up. You could have taken the easy way out, hire, hired a bank and said, okay, we’re for sale, and then end up in a, in a fire sale. But you, you never gave up the grit. Where did that come from? So how the business acu to, to look at, into the business, say, okay, we gotta figure something out.

But you can’t build grit. You’re, you’re born with grit. Where did that grit come from? Just to never, never give up when you were as a company, trying to decide where you ultimately want to go before, as I said earlier, you struck gold.

Andrew Chapin: A lot of it is just commitment to the mission. Uh, Dave and JZ have been very clear from day one, why this company exists. We are trying to bring the benefits of robotics and specifically autonomous vehicles to the world for everyone to enjoy. And it just never felt like our work was done, like the journey was over.

Uh, and I think you just have to. You have to kind of let go of attachment to outcomes and say, we’re in this for the right reasons. We enjoy the process. We’re doing good work here. We just have to keep our heads down and, and keep doing that. And uh, again, I think we’ve been pretty quiet over the last couple years just focused on building.

Uh, and that’s not always easy. I think there are certainly some folks out there who are, are making more noise, but. At the end of the day, if, if you’re building something that’s really hard and you can deliver that in a way that creates value for customers, you’re gonna find a path to success. And I think that’s where we are.

I think the future’s incredibly bright for Nuro and I, I’m grateful to be part of it.

Grayson Brulte: The future is very bright for Nuro. The, the public statements and the investments validate that in the overall structure of the deal. Validates that when, let’s just use Los Angeles or San Francisco, two major robotaxi mark markets. When you deploy the Nuro vehicle with Uber and lucid into those markets, do you have to pre preamp those markets?

And then, and then how do you envision the ODD growing over time?

Andrew Chapin: When it comes to mapping, we are moving towards an approach that does not require HD maps. We are not there yet. Uh, so our first launch cities will be reliant on HD maps. We’ve done a lot of mapping of these areas already, so it’s not gonna require necessarily incremental work for the markets that you mentioned.

Over time, it will move away entirely from HD mapping.

Grayson Brulte: When you move away from HD mapping and about let’s say three or four weeks ago, Nvidia put up a corporate blog about Map List and and allowing autonomy to scale. To me, when you achieve mapless, you just unlocked personally owned autonomy. Is that kind of, is it fair to look at that roadmap being aligned that way?

Andrew Chapin: It’s a big part of it. The other big part of personally owned autonomy is the cost of the hardware being such that people can afford it on personally owned vehicles. Uh, that is certainly a future that we think will arrive sooner rather than later. We’ve done a lot of work to down cost our AV hardware sack, uh, as I mentioned in the context of the robotaxi.

Business, but that will benefit personally on vehicles as well. Uh, I’ve had a lot of friends ping me say, Hey, how do I get a level four lucid gravity? Uh, someday. It’s not something that, uh, is available in the short term, but I don’t think you have to squint too hard to believe that the cost of our hardware will continue to come down such that that’s actually a viable economic proposition.

Grayson Brulte: You can add me to the list of people that will ping you to buy one. So I just did it very publicly. So when you get to that point, please let me know and send over the. The, the, the pre-order form Waymo is out there. They’re out there. They, oh, we’re in a road Trip City and I’ve noticed that you do a, whoever manages your X account does a phenomenal job on X for Nuro Nuro Road Trip City, and you’re, you’re here and you’re there and you post all this really cool little trivia facts about the cities.

I like somebody that studies the markets and reads the market. So Roadtrip City for Waymo’s got more than a 50% chance that eventually that becomes a deployment as we’re seeing that happened with Dallas and I believe next Nashville. Can I read into that with you or is this purely a, a data gathering, uh, exercise.

Andrew Chapin: A lot of it is about making our autonomy stack as generalizable as possible, uh, but in terms of our actual launch. Roadmap. Yes, there is overlap. So, uh, to the extent that we are doing heavy data collect in a given city, that obviously helps with the timeline to launch that market. But at the end of the day, when you have, uh, a fully end-to-end AI based approach to autonomy like we do.

You really need to inform that with as much data diversity as possible. And so the driving behavior that we see in Houston versus San Francisco versus some of these other cities that we’ve done data collect in all is pretty diverse. The ODD itself is pretty diverse. Uh, and so it’s all about just making autonomy perform.

Better. Uh, one thing you did touch on in your last question that I, I don’t think I answered, was the ODD of, of what the Uber roadmap looks like and where we are today. So one of the things that I think gives us a lot of confidence in the timeline that we’ve talked about publicly, uh, for the Uber launch is the fact that the driverless deployment that we did late last year from an operational design domain perspective is pretty similar.

To what the city scale ODD would be to launch a robotaxi service. It’s basically all surface streets within a given city. Uh, not highways yet, uh, but no restrictions on maneuvers in terms of unprotected turns or railroad crossings, so on. You have nighttime driving, you have light rain, so on. So, uh, again, from an ODD perspective.

You don’t have to progress that much in terms of where the Nuro driver was when we did that launch late last year to where it needs to be late next year. Um, obviously there are things we can continue to improve in terms of how smooth it is, how human-like it is. The, uh, scalability of the overall exposure across many, many rides and so on.

But, um, again, I would emphasize that, uh, Uber has seen a lot in terms of where AV folks are in their respective technical journeys. And, uh, they made a very informed bet, uh, in betting on Nuro.

Grayson Brulte: I like it. I, I like the bet. You said highways. Not yet. I like the keyword yet, is that, is the current, let’s call it Nuro Lucid stack, 1.0. ‘Cause obviously over time this, this stack will change. This is how technology is. Is stack 1.0 capable of highway driving from, not from a hardware perspective, remove all the legal liability, remove all the risk, just from a pure hardware standpoint.

Is it capable?

Andrew Chapin: Yes, the current sensing compute stack is highway capable. We are doing highway testing today here in the Bay Area, so next time you’re in town we’ll give you a ride along that includes some highway driving. Uh, but in terms of when those. That highway launch will come in the robotaxi con, uh, comp, sorry, context.

It is something that won’t be day one. It’s something that we’ll have to scale into.

Grayson Brulte: Oh, that’s fair. Every everybody scales into it for me. Decision making standpoint. Is the decision to expand the ODD to go on highways, is that made by ra? Is that made by Uber? Is that made by Lucid or collectively? Is there a board that makes these final, big, impactful decisions?

Andrew Chapin: In a three-way partnership like this, you really need a good governance structure, so to speak, in terms of how to set the roadmap, how to work through problems, how to manage risks, so on. So we feel very good about the collaboration between our three companies on that topic specifically, the. Roadmap for ODD for city launches.

So on is something that we’ve been in close discussions with all three of us. Uh, some of it is outlined in the agreement, some of it is not, but it’s one of those things again that we will we’ll collaborate on to get to the best answer.

Grayson Brulte: Staying on on the, the issue of the partnership of. Collaboration. I’m doing, uh, a lot of research on energy and, and a lot of research on maintenance. Obviously, the, the Nuro driver is, is highly complex. Will you work with your partners to develop a maintenance training program where individuals that are going to work on the vehicles will get training from, from all three partners of how to operate at the depot of the future.

Andrew Chapin: Yes, fleet management is a big part of the overall operating expense to make this program work. It’s an expert. It’s a, it’s a competency that Uber has built quite a bit of expertise in over the years, uh, in various forms. And given that Uber and its partners will be the one managing the fleet, we wanna do everything we can to set them up for success.

We’ve got a fleet team internally that has built a lot of expertise in terms of managing the AV hardware. Keeping uptime high, doing retrofits when needed, so on. And uh, we will be going to great lengths to transfer as much of that knowledge as possible and set Uber up for success.

Grayson Brulte: I know this is not Nuro specialty per se, but E energy I believe is one of the limiting factors for robotaxis. Truly, truly scaling today ’cause of lack of energy. ’cause you’re fighting with, with AI data centers, you’re fighting with just general utilities and I live in Florida so you’re fighting with the air conditioning man.

’cause you need energy. The, the power of the air conditioners. Do you have any insights on how the collectively the partnership is planning to get enough energy in the markets? You need to ensure that uptime, and then on the backside of that, to ensure, let’s just say hypothetically, you launch on day one with a hundred, and then on day two you have 5,000 to ensure that you have enough energy to scale for where the market is for demand perspective.

Andrew Chapin: The fleet infrastructure required to achieve the scale that we’ve talked about is not. Inconsequential as you’ve, as you’ve kind of alluded to there, Grayson Brulte, but it’s something that we’re on top of. It’s, it’s already being worked on. It’s probably a question best answered by Uber, given that it, it does fall to Uber in terms of the overall roles and responsibilities, but it’s something that, again, they will be making sufficient investment and such that it doesn’t limit our scale.

Grayson Brulte: Now that the announcement’s public, how do you feel?

Andrew Chapin: I feel great. This deal’s been a lot of work. It’s been over a year in the making. Uh, it’s incredibly complex. It’s very broad in its scope. It really sets Nuro up to be successful in a number of ways. It’s hugely validating. Uh, the vibes here are good now. Uh, for sure. Uh, I think now that this is public and we can talk about it, so everyone’s feeling really good.

Uh, we just need to deliver. We feel very confident that we will. We’ll have some other commercial announcements, uh, again in the coming months that are in the works today. Uh, but overall I think the future is bright. Uh, this deal has been really phenomenal to work with Uber and lucid on, and just excited to see it come to life.

Grayson Brulte: As you get towards deployment, will we see. Any public announcements around testing prior to deployment? Are there any plans for that, that we can look for? Sciences that the market and your partnership is really ramping up.

Andrew Chapin: Yes, we will have vehicles on the road di lucid gravity vehicles on the road doing data collect with our hardware stack relatively soon here. Uh, I don’t want to commit to a specific date, but uh, it’s something that will be. In the public, sorry, in, out in the wild, you know, on public roads, uh, quite soon.

Grayson Brulte: Nuro is scaling and Nuro is building the future interest You and the entire team. At Nuro Well done to the Uber team. Well done. And to the Lucid team. Way to go. You put your great engineering in autonomy and this is what we love to see. Well done. The future is bright. The future is autonomous. The future is Nuro.

Andrew Chapin. Keep scaling. I can’t wait to see what’s next.

Andrew Chapin: Thanks, Grayson Brulte. Great to see you again.

Key The Road to Autonomy Questions Answered