According to foreign media reports, the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) approved Nur0's testing of its third-generation R3 autonomous delivery vehicle in four cities in the Bay Area last week, sending a positive signal for the self driving startup facing setbacks and financial difficulties.
After approval, Nuro will be able to test its autonomous delivery trucks in Mountain View, Palo Alto, Los Altos, and Menlo Park. Nuro's vehicles do not have seats, windows, steering wheels, or pedals, and their design purpose is not to carry passengers, but only to transport goods. Although these vehicles are driving on public roads. But it looks more like a large sidewalk delivery robot, equipped with a temperature controlled storage unit to store food.
NurO co-founder Dave Ferquson told the media that the expanded operational area of Nur0 will give it the third (or even second) largest fully autonomous vehicle deployment area in the United States, second only to Waymo.
Nuro was once a darling of the autonomous driving industry, raising over $2 billion in funding from well-known investors. However, in the past two years, the company has undergone two rounds of layoffs and restructured its team. Currently, the company is focused on the development of autonomous driving technology, which means they have placed vehicle manufacturing and commercial operations in a secondary position.
Ferguson stated that Nuro currently has no plans to restart large-scale production or commercial operations. The company is still focused on testing and validating its new artificial intelligence architecture, and he revealed that this development approach has begun to yield benefits,
Ferguson said, "In fact, we have greatly accelerated the process of autonomous driving, and even accelerated the timetable for autonomous driving. Obviously, this is the software, as well as the hard sensors and calculations, which are closely related to L4 level autonomous driving software.