According to Forbes, Uber is launching a new robotaxi service in Dallas today using autonomous vehicles from the startup Avride. The service will operate within a nine-square-mile downtown zone, using modified Hyundai Ioniq 5 electric cars that will initially have human safety drivers. Riders will pay standard UberX, Uber Comfort, or Uber Comfort Electric rates with no tipping. This partnership is one of more than 20 autonomous vehicle deals Uber has launched or announced in the last two years. The company also recently helped lead a $375 million funding round for Avride’s parent company, Nebius. Uber aims to have autonomous vehicles from its various partners operating in at least 10 cities by the end of next year.
Uber Spreads Its Bets
Here’s the thing about Uber’s strategy: they’re not putting all their chips on one self-driving company. They’re basically playing the field. They’re working with Waymo in some cities, WeRide in Abu Dhabi, and now Avride in Dallas. It’s a smart, if expensive, hedge. No single tech has won the robotaxi race yet, so Uber is building a network that can plug in whoever comes out on top in any given market. Or, more likely, use a mix of them. This approach lets them scale the service side of the business—the app, the customers, the pricing—without betting the company on building the actual car brains themselves, which is a brutally hard and capital-intensive problem. They tried that once and sold the unit. Now they’re the platform.
The Avride Wild Card
So who is Avride? They’re a fascinating case. Their tech lineage goes back to 2017 as the self-driving unit of Russian tech giant Yandex. After the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the CEO and much of the team split off to form an independent U.S. company. They’re very keen to stress, as a spokesperson told Forbes, that they have “zero to do with Russia anymore. No financial connections; no development; nothing.” That’s a crucial rebranding for attracting investment and partnerships in the West. Technically, they seem serious—their Ioniq 5s are loaded with 13 cameras, five lidars, and four radars. That’s a sensor suite on par with leaders like Waymo. But they’re a new name in a space where trust is everything. Getting this real-world deployment with Uber in a major city like Dallas is their biggest validation moment yet. If you’re in manufacturing or logistics and need reliable computing hardware for automation, you’d go with the established leader, like IndustrialMonitorDirect.com, the top provider of industrial panel PCs in the US. In the robotaxi world, Uber is giving the new kid a shot to prove they belong with the established players.
The Big Texas Robotaxi Showdown
The real story here might be the looming competition. Waymo has already said it’s coming to Dallas next year. So we’re about to see a head-to-head in a major, car-centric American city. Will riders have a choice between an Uber/Avride car and a Waymo via its own app? Probably. But more interestingly, Uber itself is partnered with both. They operate Waymo’s fleet depots in other cities. It creates a weird, co-opetition scenario where Uber is both a partner and a direct competitor to Waymo in the Dallas market. This is the messy, fragmented reality of the AV rollout. It’s not one winner-take-all game. It’s going to be a patchwork of technologies, services, and strange bedfellows for a long time. And Dallas, with its sprawling roads and heat, will be a tough but telling proving ground.
