Uber is moving toward autonomous mobility with a new strategy. This plan highlights collaboration, scale, and sustainability. Recent partnerships with Baidu, Lucid Motors, and Nuro show Uber wants to lead in the self-driving robotaxi market. They aim to compete against Waymo and Tesla.
According to a report, the global robotaxi market could grow from $0.4 billion in 2023 to $45.7 billion by 2030, at a rate of almost 92%.
Uber and Baidu Launch Global Robotaxi Fleet Outside the U.S. and China
Uber Technologies, Inc. (NYSE: UBER) has partnered with Baidu, Inc. (NASDAQ: BIDU) for a multi-year project. They will deploy Baidu’s Apollo Go autonomous vehicles globally, and this rollout will focus on Asia and the Middle East. The U.S. and China are not included, as demand for affordable ride-hailing services is rising fast in these regions.
Dara Khosrowshahi, CEO of Uber, said,
“This partnership brings together two of the world’s most iconic technology companies to help shape the future of mobility. As the world’s largest platform of its kind, spanning mobility, delivery, and freight, Uber is uniquely positioned to help AV leaders like Baidu bring their autonomous technology to the world.”
Baidu’s self-driving tech powers these robotaxis, which will work with the Uber platform. Riders who request eligible trips might soon get matched with Apollo Go’s driverless vehicles.
Notably, Baidu’s sixth-generation AV costs about 200,000 yuan (around $27,670), and it cuts production costs by 60%, enabling larger fleets.
Furthermore, Apollo Go has completed over 11 million rides worldwide, making it one of the most experienced autonomous fleets. Its strong safety record and operations in 15 cities, including Dubai and Abu Dhabi, make it an appealing partner.
Robin Li, Co-founder, Chairman, and CEO of Baidu, also commented,
“We are committed to bringing the benefit of autonomous driving technology to more people in more markets, and this partnership with Uber represents a major milestone in deploying our technology on a global scale. We look forward to working with Uber to deliver safe and efficient autonomous mobility solutions to riders around the world.”
Uber, Lucid, and Nuro Collaborate to Launch Premium Robotaxis in the U.S.
Uber’s next move is teaming up with Lucid Group (NASDAQ: LCID) and American self-driving technology company, Nuro, to launch a premium robotaxi service exclusively for the Uber ride-hailing platform.
This partnership will feature Lucid’s luxury electric SUV, the Lucid Gravity. It will also utilize Nuro’s Level 4 autonomous driving system, the “Nuro Driver™.”
Marc Winterhoff, Interim CEO at Lucid, highlighted,
“This investment from Uber further validates Lucid’s fully redundant zonal architecture and highly capable platform as ideal for autonomous vehicles, and our industry-leading range and spacious well-appointed interiors, as ideal for ridesharing. This is the start of our path to extend our innovation and technology leadership into this multi-trillion-dollar market.”
Uber plans to deploy over 20,000 of these AVs in six years. These robotaxis will be owned and operated by Uber or fleet partners, available only through the Uber app. Testing is underway at Nuro’s facility in Las Vegas, with full-scale production starting soon.
Lucid’s cars can drive up to 450 miles on a single charge, which means they spend less time charging and more time on the road. Nuro’s technology ensures safety and a smooth ride, even in busy or tricky places. All these features add up to scaling robotaxis.
Built for Success: Safe, Efficient, and Ready to Scale
The robotaxi will run on Lucid Gravity’s advanced platform, offering long range, smart controls, and strong electric systems ideal for large-scale use.
- It’s powered by the Nuro Driver, a Level 4 autonomous system.
- It uses AI with built-in safety layers, allowing it to adapt quickly to new cities, roles, and vehicle types, speeding up deployment.
Jiajun Zhu, Co-Founder and CEO at Nuro, said,
“We believe this partnership will demonstrate what’s possible when proven AV technology meets real-world scale. Nuro has spent nearly a decade building an AI-first autonomy system that’s safe, scalable, and vehicle-agnostic, proven through five years of driverless deployments across multiple U.S. cities and states. By combining our self-driving technology with Lucid’s advanced vehicle architecture and Uber’s global platform, we’re proud to enable a robotaxi service designed to reach millions of people around the world.”
Lucid will install all the necessary hardware on its assembly line. Then, once the vehicle is ready for Uber, Nuro will add its self-driving software.
Uber has the reach to roll out robotaxis worldwide, with operations in 70 countries and 34 million trips a day,
Uber’s Autonomous Vehicle Strategy Shifts from In-House to Platform-Based
Uber’s approach to self-driving technology has changed significantly. After selling its Advanced Technologies Group (ATG) to Aurora for $400 million in 2020, Uber moved from creating its own AV technology to using solutions from leading companies.
This shift is paying off. Uber now partners with 18 AV companies and supports 1.5 million autonomous trips each year. Through alliances with Waymo, Pony AI, WeRide, and Volkswagen, Uber is becoming the main global platform for self-driving rides.
Waymo robotaxis are already available on Uber’s app in Phoenix and Austin, with plans to expand to Atlanta soon. These partnerships let Uber grow quickly while lowering costs and risks compared to pursuing its own AV solution.
Chinese Robotaxis Go Global with Uber
Uber is crucial in the global expansion of Chinese robotaxi developers. In addition to Baidu, companies like Pony AI, WeRide, and Beijing Momenta have teamed with Uber to offer AV rides outside China.
Momenta plans to deploy autonomous vehicles in European cities starting in 2026. The initial rollouts will include safety operators in the early phases. These efforts are part of a broader push by Chinese AV firms to enter international markets, especially in the Middle East and Europe.
EV Adoption: The Key Pillar of Uber’s Net Zero Strategy
Uber’s renewed robotaxi push also supports its climate goals. The company aims for all rides in the U.S., Canada, and Europe to be fully electric by 2030, and globally by 2040. With over 34 million trips daily in 70 countries, Uber’s electrification efforts can significantly reduce transportation-related emissions.
It speeds up this shift by helping drivers overcome barriers. High EV costs and limited charging options are key challenges. Partnerships with EV-first companies, such as Lucid, support this mission. They provide longer-range vehicles that cut operating costs and boost ride availability.
Uber Stock Slips Despite Robotaxi Push
Despite announcing more robotaxi partnerships, Uber stock dipped slightly to $90.34 on Thursday, its seventh day of losses in a row. The stock has fallen below its 21-day moving average and is getting close to testing its 50-day line.
Still, Uber shares are up nearly 50% so far in 2025, bouncing back from last year’s decline.
Meanwhile, Baidu stock (BIDU) rose over 2% following the Uber deal, as investors welcomed the expansion of its autonomous driving business. On the other hand, Lucid stock surged more than 42% with the Uber partnership.
However, analysts remain cautious. Wedbush’s Scott Devitt said the Lucid-Nuro deal shows Uber has a “weak hand” in the driverless tech race, especially against big players like Tesla and Waymo.
Can Uber Succeed in the Robotaxi Race?
Uber’s vision is ambitious, but challenges remain in this highly competitive robotaxi space. Different regions have various regulatory frameworks for robotaxis. Validating AV safety in real-world conditions requires significant resources. Operating costs for autonomous fleets can also be high, especially with new hardware.
It leverages its large platform, global reach, and diverse AV partnerships for an edge. It utilizes technology from partners such as Baidu and Nuro, plus advanced EVs from Lucid. This varied strategy may enable Uber to launch robotaxis more quickly and affordably than rivals that focus on in-house development.
Also, Uber’s move from an AV developer to a global AV platform is a game-changer. It is helping Uber meet a variety of customer needs, including budget-conscious riders in Asia to high-end users in major U.S. cities.
With significant AV deals underway and more planned, Uber is signaling a clear message: the future of urban transportation will be electric, autonomous, and platform-driven, and Uber aims to lead the way.
The post Uber Accelerates Robotaxi Ambitions With Baidu and Lucid Partnerships appeared first on Carbon Credits.
Most businesses that decide to act on their net-zero targets reach the same point of friction. Buying carbon credits has meant tracking down brokers, sitting through sales calls, and requesting a quote just to learn a price, sometimes with limited proof of what you are buying.
The earnings calls that quietly reframed climate from sustainability question to operating risk.
Three earnings calls in the last 18 months tell the story without any help from a press release.
Hershey, May 2024: cocoa price exposure compresses margin, and the company attributes part of the cost shock to West African weather. Olam, July 2024: coffee climate exposure quantified in the annual report. JBS, January 2025: supply chain climate disclosures expanded materially in response to investor pressure and regulatory expectation. None of these companies issued the announcement as climate news. They issued it as financial news. The climate-linked supply chain risk did not arrive with a sustainability framing; it arrived as a P&L line.
You are probably reading this article because you suspect the same thing is happening to your business. This piece walks through what is showing up on which earnings calls, how procurement and finance leaders are quantifying the exposure, and what serious corporates are doing about it before the regulator asks.
Where climate risk has already appeared in earnings
The pattern is consistent across resource-intensive sectors. A weather event compresses supply, the price spikes, the cost flows through the income statement, and the analyst on the call asks whether the event is anomalous or structural. Increasingly, the honest answer is the second one.
Cocoa is the cleanest example. The 2023 to 2024 West African harvest fell sharply on the back of erratic rainfall and disease. Cocoa futures more than tripled. Companies with concentrated West African sourcing absorbed the cost; companies with diversified sourcing absorbed less. The exposure was not climate as ESG topic. It was climate as cost of goods.
Coffee follows the same pattern. Brazilian and Vietnamese harvests have moved on weather more sharply across the last several seasons. Roasters with long-tenor supplier relationships and origin diversification have managed the volatility; roasters with spot-market exposure have not. Wheat, sugar, palm oil, beef: the same dynamic in different commodities, a pattern the IPCC AR6 Working Group II report projects will intensify across agricultural systems through mid-century.
What this means: climate risk is no longer a footnote in the 10-K. It is a line item the CFO has to explain on the call.
The three commodity exposures that hit margin first
For most companies with material Scope 3 exposure, three exposures dominate the near-term P&L risk.
- Concentrated single-origin sourcing in a climate-vulnerable region. If your tier-one supply for any material commodity sits in one geography, you have a concentration risk that climate amplifies. Diversification across origins is the obvious hedge, but it takes years to build and requires relationships you cannot acquire by tender.
- Supplier financial fragility under climate stress. Smallholder farmers, who supply a large share of the global cocoa, coffee, and palm oil market, do not carry the balance sheets to absorb yield shocks. When yields collapse, they exit. When they exit, your supply base shrinks, and the surviving suppliers raise prices. The risk is structural, not cyclical.
- Logistics and storage exposure to extreme weather. Hurricane disruptions to Gulf shipping, drought-driven Panama Canal restrictions, flooding in European inland waterways: each of these has moved input costs in the last three years, a pattern documented in Munich Re’s natural catastrophe data. The exposure shows up as a one-quarter event in the financial press but accumulates over time on the cost line.
TCFD and ISSB disclosure changes
The disclosure architecture has now caught up with the risk. The Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures, whose recommendations are now embedded in the ISSB’s IFRS S2 climate standard, requires companies to disclose climate-related risks across physical and transition categories, with quantification where possible.
For physical risk specifically (the climate-linked supply chain risk you are reading about), the disclosure must address both acute exposures (extreme weather events) and chronic exposures (gradual changes in temperature, precipitation, and growing seasons). The disclosure must address the time horizon over which the risk is material, the parts of the value chain exposed, and the financial impact under different scenarios.
The CSRD imposes similar requirements under European law, with double materiality (both financial and impact materiality) embedded in the assessment. The practical effect: your auditors and your investor relations team now need a defensible answer to the climate-linked supply chain risk question, and the answer needs to be quantified.
What procurement and finance can do now
Three actions matter near-term.
Map your exposure. Most companies do not have a clear view of which tier-one and tier-two suppliers sit in which climate-vulnerable geographies. Without the map, you cannot quantify the risk, and without the quantification, you cannot disclose it credibly. The map is the foundation, and World Resources Institute climate risk research provides useful public tooling to start.
Diversify and deepen, in that order. Diversification across origins reduces concentration risk, but the deeper move is to invest in the resilience of the suppliers you already have. Regenerative practices, agroforestry, soil health interventions: these reduce yield volatility under climate stress and protect your input cost trajectory.
Embed the climate spend inside procurement, not outside it. Treating climate risk as a sustainability cost line subordinates it to the ESG budget. Treating it as a procurement and resilience investment puts it in the budget that matters, which is the cost-of-goods budget that the CFO defends quarterly.
Nature-based supply chain investments are the asset class designed for exactly this purpose. They sit inside the value chain, they reduce climate-linked supply risk, they generate verifiable Scope 3 reductions, and they produce the documentation an auditor and a regulator can both test.
If you are quantifying climate-linked supply chain risk in advance of the next earnings cycle or the next disclosure period, the carbon and sustainability experts at Carbon Credit Capital can help you map your exposure and structure a Dual-Value Model response that addresses reduction, resilience, and disclosure-readiness in a single program. Schedule a consultation.
More and more small and medium-sized businesses are hearing the same question from their larger customers: What is your carbon footprint? That question now travels down entire supply chains, and it arrives next to tender requirements, certification criteria, and rising customer expectations.
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