Get ready to take a ride in a self-driving Rivian robotaxi.
The electric automaker said Thursday that it signed a new partnership with Uber that would put up to 50,000 Rivian robotaxis on the streets over the next several years. In exchange, Uber will invest up to $1.25 billion in Rivian, which makes its EVs in Normal.
Uber customers will be able to book a ride in a self-driving Rivian R2 as soon as 2028, when the first robotaxis hit the road in San Francisco and Miami, the companies said. The program would reach 25 cities in the U.S., Canada, and Europe by 2031.
“We couldn’t be more excited about this partnership with Uber — it will help accelerate our path to level 4 autonomy to create one of the safest and most convenient autonomous platforms in the world,” RJ Scaringe, founder and CEO of Rivian, said in a statement. “The scale of Rivian's growing data flywheel coupled with RAP1, our state of the art in-house inference platform, and our multi-modal perception platform make us incredibly excited for the rapid advancement of Rivian autonomy over the next couple of years.”
The Rivian-Uber partnership will unfold over time. The R2 robotaxis will be available exclusively through the Uber platform.
The first phase will deploy 10,000 fully autonomous R2 robotaxis, beginning in San Francisco and Miami. Uber will make a $300 million initial investment.
Uber will then have the option of buying another 40,000 robotaxis beginning in 2030. The rest of the $1.25 billion investment will be “subject to the achievement of certain autonomous milestones by specific dates, building towards a scaled, fully autonomous fleet of Rivian R2 robotaxis.”
“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 U.S.,” Dara Khosrowshahi, CEO of Uber, said in a statement. “That vertical integration, combined with data from their growing consumer vehicle base and experience managing the complexities of commercial fleets, gives us conviction to set these ambitious but achievable targets.”
Rivian makes electric pickup trucks, SUVs and vans at its Normal manufacturing plant. The company is one of McLean County’s largest employers. Rivian will no longer say how many people it employs in Normal, though clues suggest it’s somewhere between 5,000 and 7,000. When asked how R2 expansion will impact headcount in Normal, a spokesperson said, “We will be hiring in the coming months.”
