Nuro expands driverless autonomous vehicle testing in push to attract customers

Nuro is rolling out test fleet of its its driverless, passenger-less R3 vehicles across the Bay Area and Houston, two months after the the autonomous vehicle technology startup changed its business strategy to license its AV tech to automakers and mobility providers.

The large-scale demo, which will expand the domain where Nuro currently tests, is designed to show potential customers Nuro’s technology. The startup’s offer is two-fold. For OEMs, Nuro hopes to sell automated driving products for passenger and commercial vehicles. For goods delivery and ride-hail companies, Nuro’s fully driverless technology — including hardware and software — is up for sale.

Nuro, which has raised more than $2 billion from high-profile investors like Tiger Global Management and Softbank Vision Fund, had planned to own and operate a fleet of low-speed, on-road delivery bots. It performed delivery pilots with Domino’s and Fedex, and still runs a small-scale delivery operation for Uber Eats. Nuro’s R3 robot was meant to be the startup’s next-generation vehicle, and this year it received approval from the California Department of Motor Vehicles to expand testing. Nuro scrapped plans to mass produce the vehicles and pivoted after multiple rounds of layoffs and other cost-cutting measures weren’t enough to sustain its original business model.

For the first time, Nuro will test its vehicles and autonomy stack at speeds of up to 35 miles per hour in Palo Alto and Mountain View, California, and Houston.

The improved technology is now also able to handle more complex driving scenarios — such as reacting to emergency vehicles, navigating construction zones, and responding to school buses — without relying on a remote safety operator, Nuro Chief Operating Officer Andrew Chapin told TechCrunch. This is also the first time Nuro will test its vehicles at night without a safety driver, according to Chapin. 

“[The test is] across a greatly expanded geography, but also the complexity of it effectively allows us to drive on all roads, sans freeways at this point,” Chapin said. “When you think about our journey towards building a really scalable, safe, cost-effective autonomy system, this kind of establishes a new base camp on the climb up the mountain, in terms of what our system can do without the support of any sort of safety driver.”

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