Uber's Autonomous Vehicle Strategy: Every Company It's Partnering With to Build the Fleet

Rather than build its own self-driving hardware, Uber has spent 2026 assembling a network of autonomous vehicle partners and is now targeting robotaxi service in more than 10 markets across at least 15 cities by year-end, with roughly half in the U.S. and half internationally.

The deal list is long and specific: a $300 million investment in Lucid Group tied to at least 20,000 autonomous Gravity SUVs running Nuro's driving technology, a separate $300 million deal with Rivian for 10,000 R2 SUVs with the option to invest up to $1.25 billion by 2031, and a partnership with Volkswagen to bring fully autonomous electric ID. Buzz AD vehicles onto the platform starting in Los Angeles.

Uber is also expanding through Hertz affiliate Oro Mobility for fleet operations, piloting robotaxis with Nissan and Wayve in Tokyo in the back half of 2026, and launching a commercial service in Zagreb with Pony.ai and Verne — on top of new market entries in Hong Kong, Houston, Madrid, and Zurich.

The common thread across every deal is that Uber isn't betting on any single AV technology winning — it's betting on being the demand-routing layer that all of them plug into, which lets it scale by signing partnerships rather than by manufacturing or operating vehicles itself.

The company's stated target is 100,000 autonomous vehicles in its network by 2027, a scale that would be difficult to reach through any single manufacturer relationship, which is presumably why Uber is running this many partnerships in parallel rather than picking one.

For competitors and AV makers alike, Uber's aggregator strategy raises the bar for what "autonomous ride-hailing" competition looks like — the fight isn't just about whose self-driving stack is best, it's about who controls the demand side that decides which stack gets used.