The pace is picking up: Uber is now announcing new partnerships in the robotaxi sector almost weekly. Most recently, the ride-hailing platform launched a robotaxi service in Las Vegas together with Motional, Hyundai’s majority-owned subsidiary.
In addition, Uber plans to integrate autonomous vehicles from Zoox in Las Vegas and Los Angeles. The company has also committed to deploying robotaxis in 28 cities by 2028, using technology based on Nvidia systems.
Given this context, Uber’s latest robotaxi announcement comes as no surprise, though it may sound familiar: Uber is investing in Rivian to secure a fleet of robotaxis from the California-based manufacturer. A similar deal was recently struck—this time with Lucid.
Initial investment of $300 million
Soon, robotaxis from Lucid and Rivian will operate side by side—despite neither manufacturer currently having such vehicles in their line-up. To accelerate development, Uber invested 300 million dollars in Lucid six months ago and now plans to invest up to 1.25 billion dollars in Rivian.
“We couldn’t be more excited about this partnership with Uber — it will help accelerate our path to level 4 autonomy to create one of the safest and most convenient autonomous platforms in the world,” said RJ Scaringe, Founder and CEO of Rivian. “The scale of Rivian’s growing data flywheel coupled with RAP1, our state of the art in-house inference platform, and our multi-modal perception platform make us incredibly excited for the rapid advancement of Rivian autonomy over the next couple of years.”
The deal is structured as follows: as with Lucid, Rivian will receive an initial investment of 300 million US dollars. Subject to achieving specific milestones in autonomous driving by set deadlines, Uber plans to increase its investment to up to 1.25 billion US dollars over the next five years.
Initially 10,000 Rivian robotaxis planned
In return, Uber plans to deploy 10,000 fully autonomous R2 robotaxis in the first phase. The first operations are set to begin in 2028 in San Francisco and Miami, expanding to 25 cities across the US, Canada, and Europe by 2031. Additionally, Uber has secured an option to purchase up to 40,000 more robotaxis in collaboration with its fleet partners. Beyond the deals with Lucid and Rivian, Uber had previously partnered with Volkswagen to bring thousands of driverless vans of the ID. Buzz AD model to US roads in collaboration with Uber.
“We’re big believers in Rivian’s approach—designing the vehicle, compute platform, and software stack together, while maintaining end-to-end control of scaled manufacturing and supply in the US,” said Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi. “That vertical integration, combined with data from their growing consumer vehicle base and experience managing the complexities of commercial fleets, gives us conviction to set these ambitious but achievable targets.”
Rivian develops Robotaxi technology in-house
In other words, unlike other automakers, Rivian is not relying on partnerships with technology providers for its robotaxi project but is instead developing everything in-house. At its ‘Autonomy & AI Day’ in December, the company showcased its progress. This includes a self-developed silicon chip called the Rivian Autonomy Processor (RAP1) and a multimodal sensor system featuring eleven cameras (65 megapixels), five radar sensors, and one LiDAR sensor.
It is important to note that autonomous driving requires extremely fast AI chips like the aforementioned RAP1 directly in the vehicle, capable of processing vast amounts of data in real time—a cloud-based AI service is not sufficient for this purpose.