Waymo operates a large robotaxi fleet across multiple US cities and is viewed as the leading company in the space. Several competitors are working to catch up, including Nuro, which shifted from delivery to robotaxis in 2024. Nuro secured partnerships with Uber and Lucid and received substantial investment from Uber, with plans to launch in San Francisco later in the year. Nuro has begun obtaining permits needed for deployment. Nuro’s leadership believes that Waymo’s rapid scaling creates opportunities for Nuro’s engineers to study both successes and failures, reassess approaches, and improve outcomes by asking whether things could be done better.
"Waymo is the undisputed leader in the robotaxi space, operating a fleet of over 3,000 driverless cars in at least 10 cities across the US. A number of companies, including Tesla, Zoox, Avride, and Motional, are racing to catch up with the Alphabet-owned firm. But what if being No. 2 was actually better?"
"After pivoting from delivery to robotaxis in 2024, Nuro struck a deal with Uber and Lucid to deploy tens of thousands of robotaxis all across the US - netting itself hundreds of millions of dollars in investment from Uber in the process. Nuro plans on launching the service in San Francisco later this year. And earlier this month, it was granted the first of several permits it will need in order to launch that service."
"It's almost better for Nuro that Waymo is scaling at the pace that it is, said Dave Ferguson, cofounder and co-CEO of Nuro. Its early successes, as well as its stumbles and missteps, then become fodder for Nuro's engineers to reassess and reevaluate, with the goal of answering the question: Could we have done better?"
""There is a lot of value in this sort of classic second mover perspective," Ferguson said in a recent interview. "We have a huge amount of respect for Waymo ... In some of the rare cases where they're having challenges, [Nuro is] using those to kick the tires"
Read at The Verge
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