Uber to put 500 data-collection vehicles on the road this year

Uber revealed on Wednesday a prototype car that it plans to use to scoop up real-world driving data that can be used by its growing list of autonomous vehicle partners such as Avride, Waymo, and WeRide. The vehicle is not some radical design. Rather, it’s a Hyundai Ioniq 5 fitted with an incredible number of sensors on the top and sides, as the company first told TechCrunch back in January. The sensor-laden vehicle may not look particularly groundbreaking, but it does mark a few milestones for the company. This is the first vehicle Uber has assembled itself (with help from a partner) since the company sold its autonomous vehicle division to Aurora in 2020. It also represents progress on Uber’s new AV Labs division , which launched earlier this year to use sensor-equipped Uber cars to collect and then share data with its 30-and-counting autonomous vehicle technology partners. Uber said Wednesday that it plans to roll out 500 of these kitted-out Hyundai EVs globally this year. That fleet will be able to collect “2 million miles per month of high-fidelity data” for robotaxis. Uber expects 50 of these vehicles to be on the road by the summer. The Ioniqs are fitted with 14 cameras, eight solid-state lidar sensors, and nine radars through a partnership with Roush Performance, which will handle the vehicle retrofits. All of that data will be routed through Nvidia’s Dual Drive Thor autonomous vehicle computer. …