Uber Begins Collecting Autonomous Driving Data With One Hyundai Ioniq 5

Uber has placed one Hyundai Ioniq 5 equipped with cameras, lidar, and radar on its ride-hail network to collect driving data for its robotaxi partners. The vehicle will operate as a standard Uber trip while recording the variety of road conditions the platform encounters each day.

Balaji Krishnamurthy, the company's chief financial officer, said the data will help partners address edge cases that occur across the network's 40 million daily trips.

The project begins with a single vehicle and is expected to generate at least 2 million miles of data each month by the end of 2026. Uber plans to expand the fleet further in 2027. The driving data will be provided free of charge to any of Uber's robotaxi partners, including Wayve, WeRide, Nuro, and Waabi.

Uber sold its autonomous-vehicle division in 2020 after one of its self-driving cars struck and killed a woman in Tempe, Arizona. Since then the company has formed partnerships with multiple AV developers rather than building its own robotaxi fleet.

Earlier this year Uber announced a new project called Uber Autonomous Solutions to supply additional services to those partners. The current AV Lab effort is one of the services under that program.