After experiencing significant obstacles and financial difficulties, Nuro received approval this week from the California Department of Motor Vehicles to test its third-generation R3 autonomous delivery truck in four locations within the Bay Area. This is a positive development for the AV firm.
Nuro can now test its autonomous delivery car in Mountain View, Palo Alto, Los Altos, and Menlo Park, thanks to the approval. Nuro makes cars without seats, windows, steering wheels, or pedals because his vehicles are exclusively meant to transport cargo. They resemble enormous sidewalk delivery robots more than anything else, even though they use public roads and have temperature-controlled food storage compartments.
According to co-founder Dave Ferguson, the increased geographic area will be the third largest, if not the second largest, deployment of completely autonomous vehicles in the United States, behind Waymo. He did point out that Cruise may have had a bigger deployment span prior to it grounding its fleet late last year.
Additionally, Nuro has been testing its 10-year commercial agreement with Uber Eats with vehicles from third parties.
Since a few years ago, Nuro has been teasing its R3. However, last year, the company opted to postpone a planned manufacturing push that would have allowed it to produce thousands of cars in collaboration with Chinese electric car manufacturer BYD. The firm was quickly running out of money, despite earlier being the talk of the AV industry after obtaining almost $2 billion from well-known investors. Nuro reorganized its staff in order to concentrate on perfecting the autonomy component following two rounds of layoffs during the previous two years. This required postponing commercial operations and the production of automobiles.
Ferguson said that there are currently no plans for Nuro to resume large-scale production or intensive commercial activities. Ferguson claims that the company’s intense focus on testing and certifying its new AI architecture is beginning to pay off.
Ferguson declared, “We’ve actually dramatically accelerated our autonomy side timeline and even our autonomy progress.” “So that is the software, obviously, as well as the hardware, the sensing, the compute that’s tied to that autonomy software in a [Level 4] setting.”
Level 4 autonomy is defined by the SAE as having the ability to drive oneself under specific conditions without assistance from a person.
Ferguson continued by saying that Nuro has been using a fleet of modified Toyota Priuses—roughly 100, according to a person with knowledge of the situation—to test and validate the R3’s new hardware and software stack. Nuro has even gone so far as to continue using those test vehicles to do occasional deliveries for Uber Eats. Uber Eats and Nuro began a 10-year business relationship in 2022.
Nuro was able to obtain a few dozen R3s from the EV manufacturer even after postponing the BYD manufacturing arrangement. Nuro plans to introduce that fleet in the Bay Area and its other market, Houston, in the coming months.
Ferguson stated, “One of the benefits that the R3 provides, relative to the R2, is that it can go on a significantly expanded [operational design domain].” “The R2 only drives up to 25 miles per hour. The R3 will technically be able to drive up to 45 miles per hour. We won’t necessarily deploy it at that speed on day one, but it enables us to do full L4 driverless testing, deployments, and even commercialization over a much wider region—basically everything except freeways.”
Nuro’s progress has been aided by advancements in AI, both within the organization and in the industry. Ferguson claimed that in recent years, Nuro’s methodology has changed to employ one or two extremely large foundational AI models that carry out numerous functions in one location, including mapping, localization, perception, prediction, and planning, improving efficiency and performance. In order to validate its AI in real-time, Nuro then combines this with a more conventional system in which all those duties are carried out on their own AI models.
This paves the way for Nuro to scale when it’s ready, as well as enabling Nuro’s R3 to go faster and over wider regions of Houston and the Bay Area.
That won’t happen this year, and since anything produced by BYD will probably be subject to high tariffs, Nuro might need to find a new manufacturing partner when it does. Although Ferguson expressed some anxiety about the tariffs, he is generally satisfied with BYD as a manufacturing partner.