GoKawiilis transportation editor with 10+ years of experience who covers EVs, public transportation, and aviation. His work has appeared in The New York Daily News and City & State.
Waymo is the undisputed leader in the robotaxi space, operating a fleet of over 3,000 driverless cars in at least 10 cities across the US. A number of companies, including Tesla, Zoox, Avride, and Motional, are racing to catch up with the Alphabet-owned firm. But what if being No. 2 was actually better?
Nuro, the delivery robot company created by veterans of Google’s self-driving car project, thinks it has a decent shot at occupying the slot. After pivoting from delivery to robotaxis in 2024, Nuro struck a deal with Uber and Lucid to deploy tens of thousands of robotaxis all across the US — netting itself hundreds of millions of dollars in investment from Uber in the process. Nuro plans on launching the service in San Francisco later this year. And earlier this month, it was granted the first of several permits it will need in order to launch that service.
It’s almost better for Nuro that Waymo is scaling at the pace that it is, said Dave Ferguson, cofounder and co-CEO of Nuro. Its early successes, as well as its stumbles and missteps, then become fodder for Nuro’s engineers to reassess and reevaluate, with the goal of answering the question: Could we have done better?
What if being No. 2 was actually better?
“There is a lot of value in this sort of classic second mover perspective,” Ferguson said in a recent interview. “We have a huge amount of respect for Waymo … In some of the rare cases where they’re having challenges, [Nuro is] using those to kick the tires on our system and make sure that it would behave in a way that we’re comfortable and proud of as well.”
The fact that Ferguson has respect for Waymo isn’t a surprise. He got his start at Google’s self-driving car project that would go on to become Waymo, along with Nuro cofounder and co-CEO Jiajun Zhu. The two left Google in 2016 to found Nuro, first as a robot delivery service, and now as an aspiring robotaxi operator. Nuro also aims to license its autonomous driving technology to outside companies, including car companies that want to use it for advanced driver-assist systems and personally owned autonomous vehicles — though it has yet to announce any deals.
Nuro cofounder and co-CEO Dave Ferguson. Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge
To be sure, Nuro is late to the robotaxi party. While Nuro was handling groceries, Waymo was handling passengers. But Ferguson argues that Nuro’s technology is easily transferable to robotaxis — even if its passenger experience is still zero.
That’s where his “second mover” theory comes into play. Unlike Waymo, which had to discover many operational challenges firsthand, Nuro believes it will benefit from watching the Alphabet-owned company operate a large-scale robotaxi service before fully launching its own.
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