Last month, Toyota Prius cars equipped with Nuro’s autonomous driving software and human safety operators behind the wheel began testing on public roads in Tokyo, marking the first overseas expansion for the startup, which changed its business model two years ago.
Nuro said testing in Japan brings some new challenges, including different driving styles and regulations. For example, vehicles drive on the left side of the road, and Tokyo’s streets are heavily congested. Road signs and lane markings are also different in Japan.
The company, which opened an office in Tokyo last August, did not say how many test vehicles it has in its fleet or when it might remove the human safety operator from the vehicles.
“Our autonomous operations in Tokyo are the beginning of the compounding benefits of global deployment,” the company wrote.
Founded in 2016 by early Google self-driving car engineers Dave Ferguson and Jiajun Zhu, Nuro initially focused on building and operating a fleet of slow-moving, on-road delivery robots. Nuro’s offering and expertise caught the attention of SoftBank Vision Fund, which invested $940 million in the startup in 2019.
Nuro says that using an AI approach designed for widespread adoption doesn’t mean it’s compromising safety. The company says it conducts closed-circuit testing, performance evaluations, and extreme-case simulations on each new version of its universal autonomy model.
When autonomous vehicles hit the road, they are driven manually, with Nuro’s software running in “shadow mode.” Nuro said the core AI model does what the software would do, but it doesn’t send commands to the vehicle’s controls.
Nuro has gained some recognition and investor interest for its approach to self-driving software. Last year, Nuro raised $203 million in two tranches in a Series E funding round, led by existing backer Baillie Gifford and new investors Icehouse Ventures, Kindred Ventures, Nvidia, and Pledge Ventures.
Uber also participated, saying it would invest “several hundred million dollars” in Nuro as part of a broader deal with electric car maker Lucid.
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