Why does Nuro think that being a robotaxi ‘second mover’ gives an advantage

Waymo is the undisputed leader in the robotaxi space, operating more than 3,000 self-driving cars in 10 US cities. Several companies, including Tesla, Zoox, Avride, and Motional, are racing to acquire a company that owns the alphabet. But what if being Number 2 was better?

Nuro, the delivery robot company created by Google’s self-driving car experts, thinks it has a good shot at being on the scene. After banished from birth to robotaxis in 2024, Nuro partnered with Uber and Lucid deploying thousands upon thousands of robotaxis across the US – earning themselves hundreds of millions of dollars from Uber in the process. Nuro plans to launch the project in San Francisco later this year. And earlier this month, it was granted the first of several applications to launch the project.

It’s good for Nuro that Waymo is expanding as it is, said Dave Ferguson, cofounder and Co-CEO of Nuro. His early successes, as well as his stumbles and mistakes, then become fodder for Nuro experts to review and re-evaluate, with the aim of answering the question: Could we have done better?

“There’s a lot of value in this second mover concept,” Ferguson said in a recent interview. “We have a lot of respect for Waymo … Sometimes when they have problems, (Nuro uses) tires on our machines and makes sure they’re good and proud.”

The fact that Ferguson respects Waymo is no surprise. He started Google’s self-driving car project that would become Waymo, along with Nuro cofounder and Co-CEO Jiajun Zhu. The two left Google in 2016 to find Nurofirst as a robot delivery service, and now as an on-demand robotaxi operator. Nuro also wants to license its self-driving technology to foreign companies, including car companies that want to use it in advanced driver assistance systems and autonomous vehicles — though it hasn’t announced anything yet.

To be honest, Nuro is late to the robotaxi party. While Nuro was shopping, Waymo was picking up passengers. But Ferguson argues that Nuro’s technology is easily transferred to robotaxis – even if its passengers are still zero.

This is where his “second mover” theory comes into play. Unlike Waymo, which has had its own operational challenges, Nuro believes it will benefit from watching the Alphabet-owned company work on a large-scale robotaxi project before launching its own.

To that end, Ferguson wants Nuro’s robotaxi service to be very useful once it launches. He added that other features, such as freeway driving, could arrive in the future, but that the launch doesn’t follow a playbook where the company only managed certain events before gradually adding more challenges over time. That said, Nuro doesn’t plan to include “the entire South Bay on day one,” Ferguson said.

“The system is in the early stages of making this very effective,” he said. “It’s not going to be just the secure options, and then gradually we’re going to add the non-secured ones … it’s going to be very broad (of job creation) to begin with.”

The Uber-Lucid-Nuro robotaxi project is unique, as it involves three different companies: a rideshare network, a car automation system, and an autonomous vehicle startup. Under the plan, Nuro is developing visualization and computing and working with Lucid to integrate this technology into the car, Lucid Gravity SUV. The integration takes place directly on Lucid’s production line, meaning vehicles leave the factory with Level 4 autonomy. The finished vehicles are sold to Uber, which owns and operates the fleet. The rideshare company will manage the warehousing and operating equipment associated with running the service.

Uber will also oversee remote assistance for vehicles, Ferguson said. Remote support has become all the rage recently, and other members of Congress forcing Waymo and others more to come about their use of foreign workers to monitor traffic. Ferguson said this has led to widespread misinformation about companies using remote workers to quickly control robotaxis. What he does, he said, is answer questions and give advice on how to help cars when they get stuck.

“The thinking that people jump to when they’re told about self-driving cars is that they’re in a dark room driving like they’re playing a video game,” he said. “I think this is far from the way remote assistance works.”

Nuro’s long-term goal is to build the best AI control system possible, with the goal of using it in a variety of ways, including delivery, he said. To this end, Nuro’s long life in the field ensures that the company can use the lessons from its old machines, based on machine learning rules, as well as its modern learning models that make up the driving process. According to Ferguson, that legacy is important even as companies shift to AI-heavy approaches.

“You can think of this as a smart check to make sure that what we’re doing is not getting too close to pedestrians, it’s not getting too close to other vehicles, it’s not breaking traffic laws,” he said.

He acknowledged that robotaxis are suffering from a lack of public confidence, especially in edge cases and other situations where autonomous vehicles block traffic. Nuro wants to follow Waymo’s example of being transparent with its driving statistics in order to build trust with its customers, Ferguson said.

“The overwhelming evidence that we have of Nuro and Uber and Lucid are providing a product that is much safer and better on our roads than a human-driven car … it’s good for everyone,” he said. The company is still working to “refine the way we provide information, so that it is understandable and relevant to the general public.” But Ferguson said he was confident he would get there.