Maybe you’ve already seen their vehicles around.
More autonomous vehicles are expected to hit the roads in Houston next year.
Ridesharing giant Uber announced that it plans to roll out its premium robotaxi service in the Bayou City in mid-2027. Houston will be Uber’s second planned market for the program, following the San Francisco Bay Area, where the program is expected to be rolled out later this year.
Uber, Nuro and Lucid Group will bring the robotaxi program to Houston with more markets planned for the future. Currently, Nuro is conducting autonomous on-road testing with safety operators in Houston. Testing includes simulation, closed-course testing and supervised public-road testing.
“Houston is a city Nuro knows well, and we’re excited to help bring this robotaxi service to the city through our partnership with Uber and Lucid,” Andrew Chapin, chief operating officer at Nuro, said in a news release. “Houston’s large, complex metro area is an ideal market for demonstrating how Nuro’s universal autonomy platform can generalize across different geographies and operating environments. We look forward to continued engagement with the community as we prepare to launch service in 2027.”
The fleet of 100 vehicles across California and Texas will feature Lucid Gravity EVs and future Lucid Midsize vehicles equipped with Nuro Driver technology, Nuro’s Level 4 universal autonomy platform, plus a redundant sensor suite with cameras, lidar, radar and a roof-mounted halo.
The vehicles will be owned and operated by Uber and its fleet partners and made available to riders through the Uber network, according to the company.
Uber already has similar partnerships with May Mobility in Arlington and Avride in Dallas. Nuro has been around in Houston doing autonomous delivery vehicles. I’ve been seeing these branded Uber-Nuro-Lucid cars all around my neighborhood recently; I hadn’t really thought much about it, but I suppose this means their initial service area will at least include the Heights. Houston already has Waymo and, in an extremely limited role, Tesla. I still have no real interest in these things as yet, but I’m curious if you have given any of them, here or elsewhere, a try. CultureMap and the Chron have more.
There have been a lot of Nuros driving around in Montrose. These robotaxis in general scare me as a bike rider, because they do not display any sort of cautious driving in neighborhoods the way most humans do. They just rocket around, and I just have to hope one doesn’t whip around a corner and nail me.
Faint hope, but it would be really nice if these robos had some sort of ‘I see you’ signal to let me know it is safe to go ahead and cross a street or enter an intersection. Sometimes I arrive at a four way stop at the same time as a car, and there are usually some quick visual negotiations about who goes first. With the robotaxis as they are now that is impossible, and a death-defying choice must be made.