San Francisco has long been a test bed for autonomous vehicle companies, so what’s one more? Nuro, a Mountain View-based company that got its start in the robot food and goods delivery business, has recently deployed vehicles on the streets of San Francisco.
Earlier this week, I spotted a car souped up with autonomous vehicle sensors and a Nuro logo on its side driving around Glen Park. To be clear, it wasn’t one of Nuro’s zero-occupant vehicles, but just a basic sedan equipped with AV bells and whistles and operated by a safety driver.
The Nuro cars in San Francisco have been “fairly recent,” David Salguero, a spokesperson for Nuro, told Gazetteer SF.
Nuro’s using the cars to map the streets of the city, “capturing the nuances of some driving scenarios” and generating data to train the software that it plans to license, he said. “San Francisco is obvious because it’s close to our base and it’s a city that has a lot of distinct characteristics. The more unique scenarios we can kind of capture and label and feed back into our systems, the better our AI driver gets.”
Salguero said there “are just a few” of these Nuro vehicles in San Francisco, which is already home to a fleet of autonomous vehicles from Waymo and, more recently, Zoox. That said, Nuro is taking a different approach than Waymo and Zoox.
Last September, Nuro announced plans to pivot from its primary business of robot delivery to one in which it licenses its self-driving technology to carmakers for personally-owned AVs and mobility companies for autonomous ridehailing services. A couple of months later, the company began testing its custom-built cars running on its tech stack at speeds of up to 35 mph in Mountain View, Palo Alto and Houston for the purpose of showing off its new and improved software.
Nuro doesn’t have any commercial plans for San Francisco, according to Salguero, adding that “we have no long-term strategy for that.”
The focus, he said, is to license the technology while still acknowledging that Nuro still has delivery partnerships in place with Uber Eats. Even though Nuro’s robot delivery cars are off the table at the moment in San Francisco — though they operate in Mountain View and Palo Alto — it’s not inconceivable to see a world in which the company harnesses all that mapping data it’s collecting and uses it for a commercial delivery service.
Salguero added it will be a “big year for Nuro,” teasing “some good announcements” coming soon.
