Austin, Dallas, and Jersey City will serve as the testing grounds for a new initiative. Uber has struck a deal to offer customers in select cities the option to use self-driving vehicles. This partnership is with Avride, formerly the self-driving division of the Russian conglomerate Yandex.
The multi-year agreement will initially roll out Avride’s self-driving robots as a delivery option for Uber Eats orders in Austin, Texas. Later this year, these robots are expected to be available for delivery in Dallas and Jersey City, New Jersey. Additionally, autonomous driving services for Uber ride requests are slated to launch in Dallas in 2025. However, this option will only apply to “qualifying orders” on either Uber or Uber Eats, though specific criteria for these qualifications have not been disclosed.
Before becoming an independent business, Yandex had a similar arrangement in 2021 for its self-driving robots to deliver Grubhub orders to college campuses in the U.S. That same year, its autonomous vehicles logged an impressive 6 million miles under “challenging conditions,” primarily in and around Moscow.
Uber previously had its own self-driving division, but it sold that unit to Aurora, another autonomous vehicle company, in December 2020.
