Electric vehicle company Rivian announced a new partnership with ride-hailing giant Uber to advance both companies’ autonomous vehicle plans. Under the terms of the agreement, Uber will invest up to $1.25 billion in Rivian through 2031, and it expects to deploy 10,000 fully autonomous R2 robotaxis in 2028.
The first phase of these deployments is slated for San Francisco and Miami, with eventual expansion into 25 cities by 2031. Uber will have the option to purchase 40,000 more R2 robotaxis in 2030, and its investment hinges upon Rivian achieving certain autonomous vehicle milestones by specified dates.
“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, Rivian’s founder and CEO, 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.”
