Uber Brings Its Robotaxi Service to Houston in 2027

Uber will launch its premium robotaxi service in Houston in mid-2027, making the city its second US market for self-driving rides after San Francisco. The cars are Lucid Gravity SUVs fitted with Nuro's autonomous system — a sensor stack of high-resolution cameras, solid-state lidar, and radar.

The rollout is already physically underway. Uber says a combined engineering fleet of about 100 autonomous vehicles is testing in Houston, operating out of a new 50,000-square-foot depot with its own charging hub. For now the cars still carry safety operators, though Nuro has secured a permit to remove the safety drivers, and validation is running on closed courses and in simulation.

Uber is buying its way into the driverless race

The numbers behind the partnership are large. Uber has invested roughly $500 million in Nuro and committed another $500 million to Lucid, along with a pledge to buy a minimum of 35,000 robotaxi-ready Lucid vehicles. Lucid is building the first of those at its Arizona factory. Uber frames this as the start of an expansion to 'dozens of cities' in the coming years — a clear signal it intends to own a fleet rather than just list other companies' robotaxis on its app.

The competition is the obvious subplot. Waymo, owned by Alphabet, already runs in both San Francisco and Houston, so Uber is arriving second in both markets it has announced. Its counter is reach and money: rather than build a self-driving stack from scratch, Uber is bankrolling Nuro's software and Lucid's hardware and bolting them onto its existing rider network.

Mid-2027 is far enough out that the demo-versus-deployment gap is the thing to watch. A 100-car test fleet with safety operators is not a service yet; the real question is whether the driver actually comes out of the seat on schedule, the way Waymo's eventually did.