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Robotaxi Cab Confessions

A new multi-hundred-million-dollar partnership between Uber, Lucid, and Nuro aims to deploy some 20,000 self-driving robotaxis across the U.S. over the next six years. But with a slate of complex technological hurdles and attendant safety challenges, can self-driving vehicles actually replace human drives at scale in the near term?

Waymo self-driving car
Indeed, the trouble with self-driving cars deployed at mass scale is that the technology remains vulnerable to the same problem plaguing all A.I. applications: reliability. Photo: Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images
Ian Krietzberg
July 22, 2025

Five years ago, after the National Transportation Safety Board found Uber partially responsible for a fatal crash involving a self-driving car and a pedestrian in Arizona, the company temporarily shelved its fantasy of outfitting its fleet of vehicles with self-driving robotaxis. Now, the company is preparing to try again. Last week, Uber announced a partnership with Lucid, an electric vehicle maker, and Nuro, a self-driving tech company, to deploy some 20,000 self-driving vehicles, built explicitly for Uber’s ride-hail platform, in “dozens of markets around the world” over the next six years. A regulatory filing noted that production on these vehicles will begin next year. Meanwhile, Uber announced that the robotaxis will launch in a “major U.S. city next year.”