Uber Now Ordering Robotaxis from … Rivian?

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As I wrote recently, it seems that Uber is trying to partner with every robotaxi company under the sun. Apparently, that even includes Rivian now.

Let’s be honest — we have written a lot about how Tesla is nearly a decade behind on its robotaxi plans, nearly a decade, but that doesn’t mean a bunch of companies just starting to explore the topic are ahead of it. Various self-driving vehicle companies have come and gone over the past several years. In the USA, there’s basically just one that is operating — Waymo (unless you also count Zoox) — it has a long ways to go to prove it has a financially viable business. Any other hype for now is just that — hype.

Rivian sort of came out of the blue recently with its own self-driving vehicle plans. I’m sure it’s something they’ve been working on for a long time, but it’s a new topic for the company publicly. The EV startup from Illinois is looking to use more sensors than Tesla but hopefully be use affordable tech than Waymo’s (not that we really know what that costs at this point), but it is far from demonstrating any exciting proof of leadership.

Nonetheless, Uber is taking the opposite approach from putting all of its eggs into one basket — it’s putting its eggs into as many baskets as possible.

In this case, the ride-hailing giant is actually investing a good deal of money in Rivian in this partnership … as long as Rivian achieves something useful. “Uber to invest up to $1.25 billion in Rivian through 2031, subject to the achievement of autonomous performance milestones,” Rivian writes. “Uber, or its fleet partners, expected to purchase 10,000 fully autonomous R2 robotaxis with the option to purchase up to 40,000 more in 2030.” That’s not a huge volume, but it’s not nothing. But it’s contingent on Rivian getting much further than it is today.

Though, that said, there is apparently an initial investment that is being made as soon as possible — $300 million as long as regulatory approval for the deal is achieved.

Rivian isn’t planning to commercially deploy robotaxis until 2028, and that’s assuming everything goes according to plan. The company aims to offer robotaxi service in San Francisco and Miami in 2028, and then wants to achieve deployment in 25 cities by 2031. That sounds nice and all, but it would be disingenuous to say it’s much more than a dream at this point.

This is the robotaxi hype of the week: “Rivian Automotive, Inc. (NASDAQ: RIVN) and Uber Technologies, Inc. (NYSE: UBER) today announced a partnership to help accelerate both companies’ autonomous vehicle plans, expecting to deploy 10,000 fully autonomous R2 robotaxis in the first phase of R2 robotaxi deployment.”

“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. 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,” added RJ Scaringe, Founder and CEO of Rivian.

“We’re big believers in Rivian’s approach—designing the vehicle, compute platform, and software stack together, while maintaining end-to-end control of scaled manufacturing and supply in the U.S. That vertical integration, combined with data from their growing consumer vehicle base and experience managing the complexities of commercial fleets, gives us conviction to set these ambitious but achievable targets,” said Dara Khosrowshahi, CEO of Uber.

The following is a bit more from Rivian on the driver-assist technology it announced just a few months ago: “In December 2025, Rivian announced its third-generation autonomy platform, which the company expects to be one of the most powerful combination of sensors and inference compute in a consumer vehicle in North America when launched in R2 in late 2026. Rivian’s third generation autonomy platform includes a multi-modal sensor suite including 11 cameras (65 megapixels), 5 radars and 1 LiDAR. The consumer platform is driven by two of Rivian’s in-house RAP1 chips, capable of 1600 TOPS of AI compute performance. This platform, including advanced connectivity and onboard intelligent data collection, utilizes data from all onboard sensors to power Rivian’s data flywheel with real world data from the customer fleet, including the critical 3D LiDAR point clouds essential to the rapid progression of advanced end-to-end Physical AI.”