Uber and Nuro have begun testing a premium robotaxi service in San Francisco

When you see a Lucid Gravity SUV outfitted with sensors — and a self-driving system developed by Nuro — driving around San Francisco, chances are you’re an Uber employee on board.

Select Uber employees can now request a ride in the Lucid robotaxi through the Uber app, the latest phase of testing ahead of plans for a public launch later this year. Nuro, which provided these updates in the blog wrote on Monday, told TechCrunch that the cars are operating autonomously and have a human safety operator behind the wheel as a backup.

Although this is far from a public launch, it shows the company’s progress since the announcement of a the deal is a multi-million dollar deal in July 2025. Uber invested $300 million in Lucid and separately agreed to buy “at least” 20,000 of the EV maker’s new Gravity SUV over the next six years.

Those EVs have Nuro’s self-driving system, which is controlled by Nvidia’s Drive AGX Thor computer. Lucid Gravity robotaxi, that was it was revealed in Januaryit consists of advanced cameras, solid-state lidar systems, and radars that help autonomous vehicles to detect real-world locations and operate within them.

Uber also invested an undisclosed amount of “several hundred million dollars” in Nuro.

The plan is for Uber to own and operate – possibly with the help of another group – a high-end robotaxi service. Production of modified Lucid Gravity vehicles is expected to begin in late 2026, according to law enforcement it was sent last year.

Nuro completed closed-door testing and began its first testing of the Lucid Gravity autonomous SUV series at the end of last year. Nuro now has 100 self-driving Lucid Gravity SUVs in its engineering fleet, which are used to collect global data and test autonomous driving in several US cities.

According to Nuro, the crew test ride helps the team evaluate how the autonomous vehicle, vehicle, and passenger work together and operate in the workplace. It also allows the team to test the vehicle’s performance with high and low pickups, a common trick in driving.