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Uber has agreed to invest as much as $1.25bn in the US electric-truck maker Rivian and buy up to 50,000 autonomous vehicles, as it prepares to shift from human drivers to robotaxi fleets.
The ride-hailing app said it would invest an initial $300mn, rising to as much as $1.25bn by 2031, if Rivian reaches milestones in its self-driving technology, according to a statement on Thursday.
The deal includes an initial 10,000 robotaxi versions of Rivian’s new R2 SUV, with the option for Uber and its fleet partners to buy another 40,000 from 2030.
The companies said the vehicles would start unsupervised service in San Francisco and Miami in 2028 and would expand to 25 cities in the US, Canada and Europe by the end of 2031.
Uber chief executive Dara Khosrowshahi has struck a series of deals around the world as he pivots his company ahead of a future dominated by autonomy.
The company lacks its own in-house self-driving technology after Khosrowshahi sold its AV research division in 2020. Uber is instead betting on being a valuable intermediary to its tens of millions of customers while helping to manage and service robotaxi fleets.
Last week, Uber announced a partnership with Amazon’s Zoox robotaxi service starting in Las Vegas this summer and expanding to Los Angeles next year. In July, it took a $300mn stake in Lucid, Rivian’s rival lossmaking Californian EV start-up, and agreed to buy 20,000 Gravity electric SUVs.
Uber has also teamed up with Alphabet’s Waymo self-driving car unit in several secondary markets in the US, including Phoenix and Atlanta, as well as China’s Baidu in Asia and the Middle East. However, Waymo, Zoox and others have their own apps that will make them formidable competitors to Uber.
Elon Musk’s Tesla is also trying to release a fleet of driverless “Cybercabs”, but his technology still lacks regulatory approvals and so far has only launched a limited geofenced trial supervised by safety drivers in Texas.
The Uber deal is a boon for Rivian, which has suffered steep losses and an 88 per cent plunge in its share price since its 2021 initial public offering. Its $80,000-plus EV trucks and three-row SUVs have been a hit with wealthy customers in California, but the company expects only 62,000 sales this year and an adjusted loss of as much as $2.1bn.
Chief executive RJ Scaringe hopes that the imminent release of the lower-priced, midsized R2 SUV will boost earnings and expand its potential market in the US and Europe.
The partnership “will help accelerate our path to level 4 [unsupervised] autonomy to create one of the safest and most convenient autonomous platforms”, said Scaringe. He added that the R2’s sensor array comprised 11 cameras, five radars and one lidar that run on a custom-designed AI chip.
“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’s Khosrowshahi, adding that this gave the company “conviction to set these ambitious but achievable targets”.