Investors are betting on a bright future for Lucid after the Silicon Valley-based electric vehicle maker announced a $300 million deal to create a robotaxi program with ride-sharing giant Uber and autonomous vehicle startup Nuro.
The companies’ partnership was announced early Thursday. By market opening, the stock price for Lucid (NASDAQ: LCID) had surged nearly 30% and continued to gradually rise through the morning. After an initial drop, Uber (NYSE: UBER) also started a slow rise.
Together the companies are working to create a fully autonomous version of the Lucid Gravity, an electric SUV launched earlier this year, for exclusive use in Uber’s U.S. fleet. The vehicles will be equipped with a level four autonomous driving system developed by Nuro. Level four is the highest level of autonomy—ability to act without human intervention—currently available in a commercial vehicle.
“We believe this partnership will demonstrate what’s possible when proven AV technology meets real-world scale,” Jiajun Zhu, Nuro’s co-founder and CEO, said in a statement.
A proof-of-concept vehicle has already been created and is operating autonomously in Nuro’s “proving grounds” in Las Vegas. As part of the partnership, Uber has committed to buying at least 20,000 of these vehicles, Nick Twork, a Lucid spokesperson, told Fast Company.
Beyond the vehicles, Uber also invested $300 million in Lucid and “hundreds of millions of dollars” in Nuro, according to Twork and a Nuro spokesperson, respectively.
These investments follow other Uber partnerships with autonomous vehicle companies, signalling the company’s commitment to ramping up its involvement in the autonomous vehicle industry.
Earlier this week, the company announced a multi-year partnership with Baidu (NASDAQ: BIDU), a Chinese technology company deploying autonomous vehicles in non-U.S. markets. Within the U.S., Uber is also working with Waymo—a partnership that brought robotaxis to Austin and Atlanta earlier this year.
“This is the start of our path to extend our innovation and technology leadership into this multi-trillion-dollar market,” Marc Winterhoff, Lucid’s interim CEO, said in a statement.
The Lucid Gravity SUVs commissioned by Uber will be on the road in a yet-unnamed major U.S. city next year.
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