It’s been a busy year for Nuro. We publicly unveiled the company, revealed our first product, announced our first partner, and began our first self-driving goods transportation service in our first market — Scottsdale, Arizona.
This pace is motivated by a promise we made at Nuro’s inception: we want to transform local commerce, and do so in a way that makes the people we serve even safer. Before we kicked off the pilot in Scottsdale, we met with state and local leaders, a variety of regulatory agencies, local law enforcement and first responders, and community groups, to build a safe service that meets customer needs and meets all applicable regulations. We outlined our safety vision in a report entitled Delivering Safety: Nuro’s Approach, which we shared with the Department of Transportation and on our website. We believe transparency builds stronger partnerships between communities and self-driving vehicle companies.
We have also been on the road daily- operating our self-driving vehicle grocery delivery service with Kroger. This service launched in August with our fleet of self-driving Priuses. But as we noted, that was only the first step.
Now we’re preparing to introduce the R1, our unmanned custom self-driving vehicle, into the fleet. Just like with our Priuses, R1’s introduction has been a gradual and deliberate process. It started a year and a half ago with extensive private road tests. Beginning today, R1 will be on the streets of Scottsdale for the final testing phase prior to starting fully self-driving deliveries. It will be supervised at all times by our trained team of operators to ensure the safety of all road users. Our operators can intervene whenever necessary, and the vehicle itself is equipped with redundant systems and safety backups. We’ll have more information to share soon about when R1 will be delivering groceries to Scottsdale residents.
While we’ve covered a lot of ground and are excited to introduce the R1 into service, all of us at Nuro are very focused right now on making this final phase a success.
