Why I’m Joining Nuro, the Leader in Self-Driving Delivery

David Estrada
Nov 6 · 5 min read

By David Estrada, Chief Legal and Policy Officer at Nuro

I was 15 when I got my first computer, a Commodore 64. That’s late by today’s standards, but it was the dawn of the personal computer age. That rudimentary machine introduced me to what would be a lifelong passion for applying technology to solve problems. Hindsight is always 20/20, but many decisions I’ve made in my life — including learning basic coding on that C64 — paved a path that would lead me to join Nuro today as the company’s Chief Legal and Policy Officer. I’m thrilled to begin working with Nuro’s incredibly talented and passionate founders, JZ and Dave, along with their world-class team dedicated to accelerating the benefits of robotics for everyday life. This mission begins with building the first fully autonomous delivery service at city scale.

I entered the workforce out of Berkeley Law just as the consumer internet was coming into being. After practicing copyright law at web pioneer Yahoo!, I had the opportunity to join and help build a fledgling online video startup called YouTube. I witnessed how the deliberately crafted liability protections offered by the 1996 Digital Millennium Copyright Act enabled YouTube to flourish and bring about today’s streaming media world.

Several years after YouTube was acquired by Google, I began hearing rumors that Google was running a secret project code-named Chauffeur that was operating self-driving cars around Mountain View. The US government had already identified the promise of autonomous vehicles for both civilian and military applications, and in 2004 the Department of Defense created the DARPA Grand Challenge to advance the technology. Three Grand Challenge competitions were held through 2007, attracting Nuro co-founder Dave Ferguson as part of the Carnegie Mellon 2007 Urban Challenge winning team. In 2011, Dave and other Grand Challenge participants joined the newly hatched Google X unit to continue advancing the Chauffeur project. At about that time, team members began asking an important question: How can we make self-driving cars legal? I joined as the Google X Legal Director to try to help answer that question.

The legal frontier for autonomous vehicles was unexplored in 2011. There were no federal standards for self-driving software, and state laws seemed to assume the presence of a human driver in any automobile. Several of us at Google X set out to change that, working with policymakers in Nevada, California, and Florida to develop new rules that set the stage for many of the approximately twenty other state AV laws that followed. We also engaged the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to consider appropriate standards, and NHTSA has since taken a leading role in promoting the benefits of autonomous technology.

While AVs were still in formative development in 2013, I moved on to help other companies solve regulatory challenges at the heart of their emerging businesses. I was involved in the early days of the ride-sharing industry at Lyft, then on to ‘flying cars’ at Kitty Hawk, and then to Bird, where my team worked with over 100 cities globally to create the world’s first e-scooter sharing services.

We have reached a moment in time when Nuro is ready to integrate autonomous vehicles into our daily lives in a way I hadn’t originally imagined. That’s why I chose to join Nuro now.

By choosing to develop a city scale business for autonomous delivery of goods, Nuro is solving a real need and unlocking a gigantic market. Americans on average spend roughly 140 hours per year running short errands. As Dave says, Nuro is building a service and a future where “errands will become a thing of the past.” AV technology can dramatically lower delivery costs, which can bring the benefits of delivery to more communities, particularly those in underserved neighborhoods. We are already seeing this play out in practice: the Nuro pilot program in Arizona with our R1 unmanned vehicle was a huge success. Nuro has since expanded its grocery delivery service with Kroger in Houston and partnered with Domino’s, the world’s largest pizza company. With Nuro vehicles on the roads today, we can advance quickly: the more we drive, the more we deliver, the more we serve customers, the more we learn.

Unlike most other AV companies, Nuro is not only developing the autonomous software to create a better driver, but also is building a socially responsible vehicle specifically for delivery. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued an alarming report one year ago warning that we need “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society” to address the climate crisis. The Nuro vehicle is all electric, replacing carbon emitting car trips with zero emissions deliveries. Deployed at scale to replace car trips and standard delivery vehicles, the Nuro vehicle and others like it can significantly address climate change. It is also smaller and much lighter weight than a regular car, making it safer than those heavy vehicles delivering packages in our neighborhoods today. Thanks to having a thinner profile and doors on only one side, the Nuro vehicle also will provide more space to pedestrians and bicyclists that seek to move safely around it. The road does not just belong to cars, but to all of us.

Nuro’s founders, Dave and JZ, are building a company that is doing good for the world, and that culture permeates palpably through every aspect of the organization. We are uniquely focused on building a service that deploys state of the art AV technology to solve a real world problem today. There are many fascinating technical and regulatory challenges we will solve together on the road ahead. I’m excited to work alongside such talented and ethical people, and can’t wait to see the ways in which Nuro will change the world over many years to come.

Nuro

Our mission is to accelerate the benefits of robotics for everyday life. See more at www.nuro.ai

David Estrada

Written by

Chief Legal & Policy Officer at Nuro

Nuro

Nuro

Our mission is to accelerate the benefits of robotics for everyday life. See more at www.nuro.ai

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