Why Nuru thinks being the “second mover” of robo-taxis gives him an advantage

Waymo is the undisputed leader in the robotaxi space, operating a fleet of more than 3,000 self-driving cars in at least 10 cities across the United States. A number of companies, including Tesla, Zoox, Avride and Motional, are racing to catch up with the Alphabet-owned company. But what if getting second was actually better?

Nuro, the delivery robot company created by veterans of Google’s self-driving car project, thinks it has a good chance of taking the spot. after Pivoting from delivery to robots in 2024, Nuro has struck a deal with Uber and Lucid To deploy tens of thousands of robotaxis across the United States, garnering hundreds of millions of dollars in investment from Uber in the process. Nuru plans to launch the service in San Francisco later this year. Earlier this month, it was granted the first of several permits it will need to launch the service.

Dave Ferguson, co-founder and co-CEO of Nuro, said it’s almost better for Nuro if Waymo expands at the pace it is now. Its early successes, as well as its missteps and mistakes, then become fodder for Nuro’s engineers to reassess and re-evaluate, with the goal of answering the question: Could we have done better?

“There’s a lot of value in that kind of classic second engine perspective,” Ferguson said in a recent interview. “We have a great deal of respect for Waymo…in some rare cases where they have challenges, (Nuro) uses those challenges to motivate our system and make sure it will behave in a way that we feel comfortable with and are proud of as well.”

The fact that Ferguson respects Waymo is no surprise. He got his start on Google’s self-driving car project that would later become Waymo, alongside Nuro co-founder and co-CEO Jiajun Zhu. The two left Google in 2016 To find Nurufirst as a robot delivery service, and now as an aspiring robotaxi operator. Nuro also aims to license its self-driving technology to third-party companies, including car companies that want to use it for advanced driver-assistance systems and personally owned self-driving vehicles — though it has yet to announce any deals.

Nuru was definitely late to the robotaxi party. While Nuro handled groceries, Waymo handled commuters. But Ferguson says Nuro’s technology could easily be transferred to robotaxis, even if the passenger experience is still poor.

This is where the “second engine” theory comes into play. Unlike Waymo, which has had to figure out many of the operational challenges firsthand, Nuro believes it will benefit from watching the Alphabet-owned company operate a large-scale robotaxi service before fully launching its service.

To that end, Ferguson wants Nuro’s robotaxi service to be widely useful when it first launches. He suggested that some features, such as highway driving, may arrive later, but the launch will not follow a very incremental playbook as the company initially only handles certain scenarios before slowly adding more complex ones over time. However, Ferguson said Nuru does not plan to annex “the entire South Bay on day one.”

“The plan on day one is for this to be a very useful service,” he said. “These are not just going to be protected intersections, and then we slowly add unprotected ones… It’s going to be a very broad[operational design area]initially.”

The robo-taxi service Uber-Lucid-Nuro is unique because it involves three distinct companies: a ride-sharing network, a car manufacturer, and a self-driving vehicle startup. Under this arrangement, Nuro is developing the sensing and computing suite and is working closely with Lucid to integrate that technology into the vehicle. Lucid Gravity SUV. Integration occurs directly on Lucid’s production line, meaning the vehicles leave the factory already equipped with Level 4 autonomy. These completed vehicles are then sold to Uber, which becomes the owner and operator of the fleet. The ridesharing company will manage the warehouses and operational infrastructure associated with operating the service.

Uber will also manage remote assistance for the vehicles, Ferguson said. Remote assistance has come under fire recently, with Some members of Congress Waymo claim and others Be more prepared About their use of off-site workers to supervise vehicles. This has led to the spread of misinformation about companies using remote workers to effectively control robotaxis, Ferguson said. What they really do is answer questions and provide directions to help vehicles when they feel confused, he said.

“The view that the public probably jumps to when they are told about remote assistance for autonomous vehicles is of someone in a dark room driving a car as if they were playing a video game,” he said. “I think this is very far from the way remote assistance typically works.”

Nuro’s long-term goal is to build the most AI-capable driving system, with the goal of powering it in a variety of ways, including delivery, he said. To this end, Nuro’s longevity in the industry ensures that the company can apply lessons learned from older, more rule-based machine learning systems, as well as existing comprehensive learning models that produce a more natural driving style. According to Ferguson, this legacy is crucial even as the industry shifts toward more AI-driven approaches.

“You can think of this as a safety check to make sure that what we’re doing doesn’t get too close to pedestrians, doesn’t get too close to other vehicles, doesn’t violate any traffic rules,” he said.

He acknowledged that robotaxis suffer from a lack of public trust, especially regarding edge cases and other incidents in which autonomous vehicles block traffic. Ferguson said Nuro intends to follow Waymo’s model of transparency with some of its driving statistics in the interest of building trust with its customers.

“The more evidence we have that Nuro, Uber and Lucid bring a product that is dramatically safer and better for our streets than human-driven vehicles… the better for everyone,” he said. The company is still trying to “strike the right balance in the amount of detail we provide, so that it’s actually understandable and relatable to the general public.” But Ferguson said he is confident they will get there.